About Nightboat Books
OUR MISSION — Nightboat Books publishes work that challenges, transcends, and reinvents. We deepen connections between writers and readers through a commitment to the art and adventure of literary experimentation. The Nightboat catalog—provocative, rigorous, poignant, archival, and full-throated—questions and transforms our literary landscape with radical imagination.
OUR VISION — Leading with curiosity and heart, Nightboat Books endeavors to be a locus where writers, editors, translators, and readers can find each other. By publishing new experimental writing, developing a deep archive of radical queer books, providing publishing and editorial mentorship, and hosting community events, we strive to identify and meet collective needs and foster independence, rather than prioritizing the demands of the marketplace.
By following these pathways we serve and create the future(s) articulated by our books: trans, somatic, anticapitalist, diasporic, borderless, contradictory, alive. We ask ourselves and our community how small press publishing might work differently. Can we reorient the work of publishing, starting with our own internal organizational structures and community commitments, towards meeting the material, intellectual, and spiritual needs of current and future literary culture?
History
Nightboat Books was founded in Beacon, NY in 2004 by Kazim Ali and Jennifer Chapis with a vision of publishing innovative writing across traditions, and a commitment to both new and out-of-print works. Nightboat published its first book, Fanny Howe’s The Lives of the Spirits/Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken in 2005. Stephen Motika became publisher in 2007.
Now in its third decade, Nightboat has published over 250 titles. Our catalog spans style and genre, and includes writing on the AIDS epidemic, eco-poetics, revolutionary literature, queer and trans writing, migration, healing and disability, Black poetics, Asian diasporic experience, and the New Narrative movement. Nightboat is based in Brooklyn, with staff in New York, California, and Mexico City.
about the name
The name Nightboat signifies travel, passage, and possibility—of mind and body, and of language. The night boat maneuvers in darkness at the mercy of changing currents and weather, always immersed in forces beyond itself. To us, this image speaks directly to the creative process. Particularly in the generative stages, the writer is a navigator, a listener, a seeker of truths original to one’s individual course and vision. A writer trusts the symbiosis between body, mind, spirit, heart, and those things larger than the self. Their allegiance lies with the written word, not unlike the sailor and the sea, or the mountaineer and the mountain.
The writer is the vehicle, the guide, and the terrain all in one, yet they are none of these things. Simultaneously lost and found, they revel in this foreignness, the grace of existing between places and states of mind, and of not really belonging anywhere. Perhaps writing a book is a way of locating and capturing something that will never stop moving. Perhaps reading a book is a related gesture. It is our goal at Nightboat Books to shed enough light that the writer and reader can find one another.
– Kazim Ali
Nightboat Books thanks its funders for their support!
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, Poetry Foundation — and our Board of Directors, Publisher's Circle, Friends of Nightboat, and the many individuals sponsoring books. Thank you!