December 2024 Roundup

It’s 2025, and we are so thrilled to wish you all a very Happy New Year! 2024 was a fantastic year for us, publishing a total of 56 books, ranging from poetry to philosophy and everything in between. We saw our authors win multiple awards, from Quinn Carver Johnson’s LAMMY (The Perfect Bastard) to Michelle Liu Carriger’s ASTR Barnard Hewitt Award (Theatricality of the Closet). Our specialty projects brought great joy to our hearts, publishing both a selected poems volume of the inimitable Cheryl Clarke in Archive of Style and bringing to life the history of Northwestern’s iconic improv/sketch/comedy show in The Mee-Ow Show at 50. We are immensely proud of our author’s publicity and event efforts, having seen them put on some fabulous launch events and land podcasts, interviews, and more. It has been an absolute joy bringing this blog back to life; we hope that it can continue to be a place to advance understanding and offer transparency, encourage teamwork and relationship building, and remember to celebrate the little (and big!) things that come our way throughout the whirlwind process of book creation.

Looking Forward to 2025

Looking forward to the new year, we have so much in store for you, it’s hard to know where to begin! This month, you’ll hear from Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum (author of Elita) and Emma Bond (author of Curating Worlds) as they delve deeper into personal stories that informed their projects and outlooks. We are continuing on with our star sign suggestions for all you astrology lovers out there. We are thrilled to be seeing many of you at AWP in March, which will be a sunny reprieve of the Chicago winter for us and a chance to meet many of our authors for the first time in person. As always, keep your eyes peeled for flash sales, fundraisers, and more on our Instagram, Bluesky, X, and Facebook. We would be remiss not to mention our spectacular lineup of books coming out this spring; whether you are into ocean life and nature interwoven in prose (My Oceans and Transanything), the Roman Empire or the history of France (Agrippina the Younger and In the Sun King’s Cosmos), or finally some wordy discussion of Dmitry Khvostov (The Graphomaniac), there is something for you just around the corner!

We are taking this post not only to look forward to the year ahead, but to celebrate the amazing books and achievements that came to life in the month of December. Take a peek below to see what our fabulous authors achieved during the holiday season, and once more, Happy New Year!

December Publicity

Podcasts:

Jean-Thomas Tremblay and Steven Swarbrick discussed their book Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction on the ASLE EcoCast

Poet Perry Janes discussed his collection, Find Me When You’re Ready, with the Keep the Channel Open podcast

Interviews:

Michelle Suzanne Mirsky discussed her collection Here, Now with Jessica Phillips Lorenz for Mutha Magazine

Sophie Ratcliffe discussed her book Loss, A Love Story with Nicholas Dames of Public Books Magazine

Maggie Nye discussed her novel The Curators with Bradley Sides of the Southern Literary Review

A profile of Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum and her forthcoming novel, Elita, was published by Seattle’s Child Magazine

Reviews:

Roberto Carlos Garcia’s Traveling Freely was reviewed by the Dominican Writers Substack

Priscilla Dionne Layne’s Out of This World: Afro-German Afrofuturism was reviewed by the Ancillary Review of Books

Cheryl Clarke’s Archive of Style was reviewed by RollingOut.com

Bookstagrammer @alifeonbooks reviewed How to Quiet a Vampire by Borislav Pekić, God Went Like That by Yxta Maya Murray, The Kukotsky Enigma by Ludmila Ulitskaya, Paranoia by Victor Martin

Booklists:

Sarah Lyn Rogers’ Cosmic Tantrum was included in Debutiful’s Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2025 Part 1 List

THREE NUP Titles, A Small Apocalypse by Laura Chow Reeve, Miss Southeast by Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers, and Archive of Style by Cheryl Clarke, were named Best Queer Books of 2024 by Autostraddle

Michele Weldon’s The Time We Have appeared on the Evanston RoundTable’s Book Giving List

Excerpts:

An excerpt of Christina Rivera’s My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women was published in The Cut

Awards:

Northwestern University Press Director, Parneshia Jones, was awarded the Adam Morgan Literary Leadership Award by the Chicago Review of Books

Looking Ahead to January

In January, you can find the press at the MLA Convention in New Orleans from January 9-12.

January Books

Books for Capricorns

It’s only fitting that the beginning of the year falls within Capricorn season. Practical and productive Capricorn is the workaholic of the Zodiac. Capricorns, represented somewhat inexplicably by a sea goat, are born between December 22 and January 20. Dutiful, disciplined, and driven, Capricorns occasionally struggle with rigidity and self-criticism, but are equally dependable, loyal pals. Consider one of the books below for the Capricorn in your life!

Happy birthday, Capricorns!