Hub City Press to publish musician Lee Bains's collection WORK LUNCH

Hub City Press is pleased to announce that it will publish songwriter, musician, and poet Lee Bains's poetry collection, Work Lunch, in the fall of 2026. Work Lunch explores, much like Lee’s music, the multi-faceted and often contradictory nature of Southern culture and values through the lens of food, whether at a meat-and-three or a McDonald’s. In sprawling, long-form poems, Lee explores subjects of family, the often invisible work of service, the horrors and comforts of fast food chains.

Bains says, "I’m grateful that my first poetry collection will be published by Hub City, a Southern independent press committed to carrying the varied, nuanced, and idiosyncratic voices of a South familiar to me—one that I know, love, growl at, wonder at, and try to write about. My experience in music has shown me the autonomy, community and authenticity that can only be made possible by independent labels, venues, radio stations, and record stores, and I’m stoked about this chance to get to know the people and places of the independent literary world, as well."

Lee Bains is a songwriter, musician, and poet. With his band, Lee Bains & the Glory Fires, he has released four studio albums. Lee’s poetry has been featured in the New Yorker. In his intro, poetry editor Kevin Young said: “Bains praises the working man’s lunch while commenting on both work and manhood. Bains’s freewheeling poetic sequence ‘Work Lunch,’...focuses not only on the food that sustains us but also on what, and who, makes such sustenance possible.” He and his band have been covered in Rolling Stone, NPR, Washington Post, Bitter Southerner, Oxford American, among others. He holds a degree in English from NYU.