About Nightboat Books
OUR MISSION — Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries, by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence and risk.
History
Nightboat Books was founded in 2004 by Kazim Ali and Jennifer Chapis, with Ali serving as the press first publisher. The press 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. The press has gone on to publish more than 130 titles. The press has maintained offices throughout New York state: Beacon, Cold Spring, New York, and Callicoon. Since 2018, the press has been based in Brooklyn, NY.
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. By our way of thinking, 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. Her 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 she’s none of these things. Simultaneously lost and found, she revels 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, so the writer and reader can find one another.
Nightboat Books thanks the Funders for their Support:
The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, Benjamin Taylor, The Topanga Fund — and the many individuals sponsoring books. Thank you!