The origins of Scrub Jay Press<\/p>\n
Zumwalt co-founded Scrub Jay Press with his wife, Chris Henson.<\/p>\n
The couple, both Fresno State professors in the English Department, named the press after a bird common in the trees surrounding their home in the foothills about a 40-minute drive northeast of campus.<\/p>\n
They started Scrub Jay after a traumatic period at the university for her husband, Henson said, following his forceful removal as chair of the English Department in 1970.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Fresno State administration at the time \u2026 came to see the English Department as the hotbed of radicalism. There was a kernel of truth to that,\u201d Henson said. \u201cEugene was involved in the group of professors that really tried to bring a number of Chicano students onto campus. None of this sounds particularly radical now, but it was at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Henson said administrators suspected Zumwalt and his department associate chair, Roger Chittick, of being \u201cthe masterminds coordinating all of this,\u201d which, Henson said, was false.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow,\u201d she said, \u201cthey were taking action. There were faculty members that they were trying to help get legal representation, who were in danger of being fired, or were in fact fired. They were involved in that. And Eugene was eventually very much involved in actually getting the faculty union.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a 2011 segment recorded for KVPR<\/a>, Zumwalt detailed his experiences from that time, including police surveillance and a spy posing as a student in his literature course.<\/p>\n Zumwalt and Chittick also long suspected their office was bugged.<\/p>\n \u201cThe (university) president at the time was a guy named Norman Baxter,\u201d Henson said. \u201cYou\u2019d have to know Roger to really appreciate this, but Roger would just, every once in a while, out of nowhere, shout, \u2018Fuck you, Baxter!\u2019\u201d in hopes the bug would pick up the message.<\/p>\n These tensions came to a head in 1970 when Zumwalt went to his office and was met by armed police officers, a two-by-four bolted over the door to his office and a hand-delivered letter from the dean of the School of Humanities letting him know he was no longer chair of the English Department.\u00a0<\/p>\n The events surrounding that day are chronicled in the 1979 book \u201cThe Slow Death of Fresno State\u201d by fellow faculty member Kenneth Seib<\/a>.<\/p>\n Despite these experiences, Zumwalt never left Fresno State. Indeed, he outlasted many of the administrators<\/a> that repeatedly failed to get rid of him. But that all took a toll, Henson said, and Scrub Jay became a welcome distraction.<\/p>\n \u201cHe basically was looking for things to focus on away from the university,\u201d she said. \u201cHe got involved with the Audubon Society. He started the press. I mean, I think he\u2019d always been interested in that, but he wanted other things to focus on.\u201d<\/p>\n The couple published three books of poetry by local writers in the first 14 years of Scrub Jay, plus a few other volumes of nonfiction and photography by friends and acquaintances. They stopped the press in 2010, feeling burnt out. They talked about other projects over the years, Henson said, but never got to them before Zumwalt died in 2023.<\/p>\n Henson never dreamed Scrub Jay would get a second life. But said she was delighted when Beavers and Dzerigian approached her \u2014 and believes her husband would be, too.<\/p>\n Expanding the universe of Fresno writers<\/p>\n The three major anthologies of Fresno poets that came before now contained some of the city\u2019s most revered writers. But they also featured mostly men, mostly white writers and only poets.<\/p>\n That\u2019s something that Fresno poet Roda Avelar is well aware of, and why she was pleased the Scrub Jay editors solicited submissions from her for the new anthology.<\/p>\n \u201cFresno has become a lot more varied, a lot more diverse. So many of the writers I know in Fresno are queer and trans and disabled,\u201d she said. \u201cI obviously have no idea who else is in this book, but I myself am a trans woman, and just the inclusion of that perspective, of that voice, and being able to submit that experience in the context of Fresno poetry is really important to me.\u201d<\/p>\n Avelar is part of a new generation of Fresno writers, one that Scrub Jay editors\u00a0want to celebrate with the anthology \u2014 people who may not have a book to their name yet, but probably will in the next five years, Beavers said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even though the poetry community has gone through changes and lost towering figures like Zumwalt and others over the years, it\u2019s still as special a place as ever for earlier-career writers like Avelar.<\/p>\n She has felt \u201ctaken aback\u201d by its generosity at times, including when her poet friends covered the cost for her to attend a writing conference she couldn\u2019t afford and told her she could pay it back on her own time. Avelar has also experienced its supportiveness in the earliest days of her poetry career at Fresno City College, when her work was published for the first time in a student literary journal.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/USElitpresses_edited.jpg\")
Eugene Zumwalt, one of the cofounders of Scrub Jay Press, used to set type by hand for some of the poetry books he and his wife Chris Henson published. Henson still has several drawers\u2019 worth of metal type at her house. Julianna Morano | Fresnoland<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/USEprioranthologies.jpg\")
Copies of the three major Fresno poetry anthologies are pictured, from left to right: \u201cDown at the Santa Fe Depot\u201d (1970), \u201cPiecework\u201d (1987) and \u201cHow Much Earth: The Fresno Poets\u201d (2001). Julianna Morano | Fresnoland<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/USEcourtesyofjeffersonbeaversI.jpeg\")
Eugene Zumwalt built a display case, enshrining the bolts that were used to barricade him from entering his office as English Department Chair in 1970, which now lives in a department supply closet. \u201cThe Slow Death of Fresno State\u201d by Kenneth Seib chronicles that day and the events surrounding it. Courtesy of Jefferson Beavers<\/p>\n