Torrey House Names Will Neville-Rehbehn Publisher and Expands Its Fiction and Poetry Plans

Salt Lake City’s Torrey House Press has named Will Neville-Rehbehn as its next publisher, marking a leadership change at the independent press as it broadens the kinds of books it wants to acquire. The nonprofit imprint says it will continue prioritizing environmental nonfiction while also pursuing more diverse genre fiction and poetry.

Neville-Rehbehn joined Torrey House in September 2022 and had been serving as executive director alongside former publisher Kirsten Johanna Allen. Allen, who co-founded the press with Mark Bailey in 2010, became publisher when Torrey House converted to nonprofit status in 2015. She will remain with the company part time as editorial director.

In the transition, Allen retains an important editorial role. Neville-Rehbehn described her as central to the press’s acquisitions work and said he is glad she will continue contributing her institutional knowledge and experience. The arrangement suggests continuity for a press that has built a distinct identity around books connected to land, environment, and the American West.

Torrey House typically publishes 10 to 12 titles a year and has worked across several lanes within that mission. Its list includes environmental writing from Pam Houston, whose Animals Taught Me Everything is scheduled for October, the National Parks Mystery series by Scott Graham, including Great Sand Dunes Massacre, and Patrick Ramsay’s queer ecopoetics collection A Field Guide to Wanting, due in June 2027.

Neville-Rehbehn said the leadership change creates an opportunity to accelerate acquisitions while preserving the press’s support for indie authors and regional storytelling. He emphasized that Torrey House’s reputation for environmental nonfiction remains a foundation of its work, but not the only direction it intends to pursue.

That broader direction is already visible in recent and upcoming titles. The press has been testing what place-based environmental fiction can do through books that pair genre storytelling with questions of justice and society. Those projects include the Indigenous feminist and futurist anthology Beyond the Glittering World, available now, and Audrey Lee’s The Turn, a May 2027 time-travel thriller centered on Chinese American history in the West.

The house is also looking closely at fiction after seeing strong preorders for Stitched, a September release by social media influencer and Salt Lake Tribune columnist Eli McCann. The novel follows two gay men who join an older women’s quilting group in an intergenerational Utah story, and Neville-Rehbehn said it has become the best-selling book in Torrey House history by a wide margin.

He said the title points to an audience the press believes it can serve more fully: younger readers drawn to contemporary fiction and older readers looking for books that reflect their lives and experiences. Going forward, Torrey House wants to be more explicit about the kinds of submissions it seeks, especially for books that do not resemble the press’s earlier lists. That includes issue-oriented, place-based genre fiction from authors representing diverse Western communities, alongside the environmental deep dives that have defined the press for years.