Hi, I'm Florin Marksteiner, a Canadian author and life coach, with Romanian roots and last year I started a Poetry Festival in Romania in memory of a dear poet friend that passed away in 2024 and his dream was to find a way to get the poets to be published for free.

I understood his pain:

In Romania, the publishers understood that the publishing business means that the poets pay for everything, the publisher prints the books, ships them to the author and they are done. The cruel reality is that the authors, being creative people, not business people, they pay for "publishing" their poems, then they gift all the book. Doing this, they get more and more in debt and their financial situation gets worst and worst and no one wants to admit it. This is what happened to my friend, too.

So, I decided:

I will find a way to have his wish come true. This is how the festival idea came to life. And the idea was simple: there will be a poetry competition and the ones that are the best are being published for free by Romanian publishing houses. The idea was beautiful and the fact that one publishing house would do a nice thing for one author was almost ideal. But... from 65 publishing houses none of them answered our call to collaborate, so we started a publishing house specially to fill this void. And we promised everyone that the best poets will be published for free. And we like to keep our promises.

Now, all the publishing needs to be funded and because it's a private initiative that doesn't involve the Ministry of Culture or other organization, there is no funding so we need to do it ourselves. For that, I presented the plan in 2 business clubs (about 100 entrepreneurs present at the time) and we had no interest from them, even that we offered great WIN-WIN collaborations.

And because of that, I make de credit with a bank and published 10 poetry books and the festival anthology and I am really happy that I was able to keep my word and do what I promised from the beginning, but the plans didn't work as I imagined in the beginning and in October will organize the second edition of the festival to look for the best poets to be published for free. It feels like and uphill battle, but we're creating a change and I know it will change a lot of lives.

So, now, I need to do this.

Now I am starting this fundraiser to be able to sustain this initiative until this will take off by itself, until the society will embrace it and it will see that without poetry and culture, we're not who we are.

How the funds will be used:

This is the 2025 Anthology:

And these are the books we published till now.

Thank you in advance for your support!