A brief word on Artificial Intelligence, since this has also become an issue in the publishing and media world (and also because my novel Robert Johnson’s Freewheeling Jazz Funeral deals with these very themes) – Multicanon Media is adamantly against the use of AI in the writing, editing or production of its books and albums or any of its other media creations, including music videos, recorded videos, or any other creative product the company produces or publishes. In interests of full disclosure, I used Claude AI to make this website's code compabitable with mobile devices; but that is where my use of AI ends. Other than that, to code this website, I use coding from a template I developed myself in the early aughts, and I continue to code this website myself without the help of AI, line by line, now that the code has been modernized.

As for the creative work, my novels are completely written by me, myself and I, and edited by me, myself and I (and, my latest, also edited by my wife, Anne, as acknowledged in the shout-outs). My covers are, similarly, all produced by me with zero help from AI; or by commissioned artists, as in the case of Harlem Mosaics, which was developed by the astoundingly talented artist Cinque Schatz back in 2012; or in the case of Bruce Nugent's novel, the Brooklyn Museum was kind enough to give me permission to use an original Nugent from their collection as the cover. Beyond that, since the other work Multicanon publishes comes from the public domain, this work is obviously not infected by the widespread plagiarism and ecological devastation that AI is foisting upon us.

On a somewhat unrelated note, although I am still deeply invested in my Black esotericism from the archives project, the next official project by Multicanon Media should be arriving in the next few months, and that is a republication of the groundbreaking anthology from the Harlem Renaissance, Ebony and Topaz, with a new introduction from none other than me, myself, and I.

- Whit Frazier, June 12, 2026

Multicanon Media welcomes in 2026!

It has recently come to my attention that McFarland & Company has already published an anthology that is quite similar to what I had planned next for Multicanon Media: “Girl, Colored” and Other Stories: A Complete Short Fiction Anthology of African American Women Writers in The Crisis Magazine, 1910–2010.

This is a tremendous undertaking, and much love to the publisher and especially the editor, Judith Musser, for doing this important work.

With that much said, it does not make sense to publish a book that already exists, and so I am officially cancelling Multicanon Media's previously planned project, "Women of the Crisis." I hasten to add that I am very happy to see that this work is already being done by other small publishers!

I am also excited to announce that because this project has been shelved, the next project Multicanon Media plans to publish will be a collection of African American esoterica. My hope is to comb the archives for little-known material that has entered the public domain, and anthologize a tradition of occult spiritual texts written by Black Americans throughout the history of the United States.

- Whit Frazier, December 27, 2025

Multicanon Media welcomes in 2024 with a new mission statement!

In 2023 we published Richard Bruce Nugent's short novel Half High, a novel which was previously unpublished and unavailable to the public except in the Bruce Nugent Papers. Nonetheless, the novel is in the public domain, and so I decided Multicanon Media should publish it since I had a digital copy, which had been given to me by Tom Wirth, who was close to Nugent.

To that end, I would like to announce a developing direction and mission for Multicanon Media as a small media company. Since much of my academic research involves critiquing the cultural canon and looking for lost treasures, especially in Black literature, I have decided that Multicanon Media will focus its next efforts on also working as a literary excavation activist publisher.

Building off an article I recently published in Women in Publishing: 1900-2020, published by Edinburgh University Press, and in celebration of Women's History Month 2024, I have decided that Multicanon Media's next project, then, will be a collection of literature written by women - literature that was originally published in the pages of the Crisis under the watchful eye of Jessie Fauset.

Sign up for our newsletter on the "contact" tab for updates!

- Whit Frazier, March 13, 2024

The Multicanon Media Company, LLC is devoted to promoting diverse work by writers with weird, wonderful and strange new voices -- voices traditional publishers ignore. Since traditional publishers continue to promise a diversity in their authors, titles and staff that they can't deliver, we tend to think the problem is probably systemic.

So, we're interested in multiplying the literary canon. Instead of trying to grow the canon within an already exclusionary aesthetics, we publish work that pluralizes the literary canon -- work that pulls back the veil and reveals the multicanon -- the rich multicanon that, much like a multiverse, is infinite in variety and aspect -- a multicanon of bizarre, experimental fiction and traditional genre fiction with new and fresh visions -- a multicanon of poets who write like prophets and a multicanon brimming with stories that broaden English language literature through daring revisionary aesthetics.

You ain't gonna get that without diversity.

By calling ourselves a media company instead of a publishing company, we keep an eye out looking past the past and the future at the same time. We love books – that's what got us started – and now we find ourselves in a fascinating world of multimedia. Multicanon explores the possibilities of media in all its varied forms as the multicanon goes careening wildly into the future!

- Whit Frazier, 2021