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| Parent company | Northwestern University |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1893 |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Evanston, Illinois |
| Distribution | Chicago Distribution Center (US)[1] Scholarly Book Services (Canada)[2] Eurospan Group (Europe)[3] |
| Publication types | Books |
| Official website | nupress |
Northwestern University Press is an American publishing house affiliated withNorthwestern University inEvanston, Illinois. It publishes 70 new titles each year in the areas ofcontinental philosophy, poetry, Slavic and German literary criticism, Chicago regional studies, African Americanintellectual history, theater andperformance studies, and fiction.[4]Parneshia Jones is director of the press.[5] It is a member of theAssociation of University Presses.[6]
Founded in 1893, Northwestern University Press was initially dedicated to the publication of legal periodicals and scholarly legal texts. In 1957, the Press was established as a separate university publishing company and began expanding its offerings with new series in various fields.
Northwestern University Press publishes a wide range of titles. In 1963, the Press publishedViola Spolin's landmark volume,Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques, which has sold more than 100,000 copies since its publication, and Northwestern's theater list includes works by Tony and Academy Award winners such asMary Zimmerman,Tracy Letts, Bruce Norris, andHorton Foote, as well as playwrightsDavid Ives,Craig Wright, andIke Holter. In 2025, the Press began republishing the work of controversial writerWendy C. Ortiz.[7][8]
SPEP is a series of scholarly monographs and translations founded byJames M. Edie and published by Northwestern University Press since the early 1960s, including works byMaurice Merleau-Ponty,Paul Ricoeur, andEdmund Husserl. The current series editor isAnthony Steinbock.[9] The series was founded as a collaboration with theSociety for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and has been described as "one of the high watermarks in the society’s development."[10]
In 1990, Northwestern University Press established a fiction and poetry imprint under the imprint nameTriQuarterly, the name of an influential literary journal founded at the university in 1958 and operated by the press from 1964 to 2009. Writers such asNikky Finney,Karla F.C. Holloway,Christine Schutt,A. E. Stallings,Patricia Smith,Bruce Weigl, andAngela Jackson have published titles in the imprint, including works that have won theNational Book Award,Whiting Awards, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and theHurston/Wright Legacy Award.[11]
In the 1950s, theModern Language Association (MLA) established the Center for Editions of American Authors (CEAA), which proposed to organize textual editing and publication projects for major American authors.[12] Melville scholarHarrison M. Hayford engaged Northwestern University Press to publish definitive editions of Melville's body of work, which would be established through analysis and review of Melville works at theNewberry Library. The library contained 6,100 items, including at least one copy of every printing of each of Melville's books published in his lifetime, since Melville made textual changes.[13] Completed in 2017, the series includes fifteen volumes.
Founded by SlavicistGary Saul Morson, Studies in Russian Literature and Theory (SRLT) "provide perspectives on Russian literature from all periods and genres, as well as its place in the broader culture. Authors whose works the series explores includePushkin,Dostoevsky,Gogol,Tolstoy,Zamyatin,Pasternak, andNabokov. More than a hundred monographs have been published in the series since 1989.[14] Awards in the series include Jenny Kaminer'sWomen with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture winner of the Heldt "Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian women's studies" prize.[15]
In 2010, Northwestern University Press acquired the publisher of international literature and Latin American voices,Curbstone Press.[16] The imprint includes works byLuis Rodríguez,Martín Espada,Gioconda Belli,Claribel Alegria,Salah Al Hamdani,Ana Castillo,Wayne Karlin,E. Ethelbert Miller,Sergio Ramírez, andLe Clézio.[17]
The Press has received many accolades, including major translation awards forFyodor Dostoyevsky'sWriter's Diary: Volume I, 1873–1876, translated by Kenneth Lantz;Ignacy Krasicki'sAdventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, translated by Thomas H. Hoisington; andPetra Hůlová'sAll This Belongs to Me: A Novel, translated byAlex Zucker. In 1997 the Press won theNational Book Award for Poetry forWilliam Meredith'sEffort at Speech, followed by a 2011 win forNikky Finney'sHead Off & Split. Several of the Press's titles, includingFording the Stream of Consciousness,Still Waters in Niger, andThe Book of Hrabal, have been named Notable Books byThe New York Times Book Review. The Press published two novels by the winner of the 2002Nobel Prize for Literature, Hungarian authorImre Kertész.Florida, a novel byChristine Schutt, was a finalist for a National Book Award in 2004. Northwestern University Press publishedHerta Müller's novelTraveling on One Leg which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.
NU Press's "Forest Primeval" won the 2017Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, andPatricia Smith'sIncendiary Art won the same award in 2019.[18]. Also for "Incendiary Art",Patricia Smith (poet) won theLos Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry in 2018.[19]
Northwestern University Press is the distributor forLake Forest College Press[20] andTia Chucha Press.[21]
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