From a small house on Noyes Street within view of the main Northwestern campus on Sheridan Road, 15 dedicated employees and one graduate fellow think and write about “works of enduring scholarly and cultural value.” Subjects vary. Eventually a few of these ideas become books.
This is the home of Northwestern University Press.
Independent publisher, prize-winning authors
Founded in 1863, Northwestern University Press primarily published legal documents and books about the law for its first 60 years. After 1957, it became an independent university publishing company and expanded its subjects to include African studies, phenomenology, philosophy, literature and literary criticism.
Today the Press publishes theater and performance studies, writings of Herman Melville (in conjunction with the Modern Language Association), philosophy, Slavic studies, literary criticism and regional books about Chicago, among its many specialties. It has the exclusive rights to the works and publications of Viola Spolin including her seminal work, Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques. Since 1963 it has sold more than 100,000 copies.
The list of awards and honors received by NU Press authors is long and regularly updated. The backlist of the Press includes first publications of authors who have won major prizes later in their careers, including four recent recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature (Imre Kertesz in 2002, Herta Müller in 2009, Olga Tokarczuk in 2018 and Peter Handke in 2019).
One eagerly awaited book is The Mee-Ow Show at 50: From Cultural Rebellion to Comedy Institution. It has a publication date of October 2024.
Parneshia Jones, NU Press director, is a poet in addition to being an editor and publisher. Her first book, a 2015 poetry collection, Vessel: Poems, won the Midwest Book Award, and O, The Oprah Magazine, named it one of “12 Books to Savor.”
Jones is a third-generation Evanstonian. She has worked at the Press for more than 20 years and held nearly every job. She started as a marketing assistant in February 2003 and has worked in all aspects of publishing, including sales and marketing, acquisitions and rights and contracts. In 2020 she advanced to director, the top job. She is the first Black woman to lead the Press.
She also oversees a specialty imprint called Seminary Co-op Offsets, a partnership between Northwestern University Press and the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.
The Seminary Co-op Offsets’ website describes its mission as “to showcase outstanding work in literature and the humanities, focusing on new translations, lost classics, out-of-print gems, and works highlighting the rich literary history of the South Side of Chicago.”
A home for ‘book people’
The people who work at the Press describe themselves as “book people.”
Marisa Siegel is the senior acquisitions editor for trade. Prior to Northwestern, Siegel was owner and editor-in-chief at The Rumpus, an independent, online literary magazine. Siegel oversees the general Northwestern University Press list plus two specialty imprints, TriQuarterly (primarily fiction and poetry) and Curbstone (primarily fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry and translation).
Megan Stielstra is the senior acquisitions editor (regional). She focuses on trade titles about Chicago and the greater Midwest, and also oversees the theater list. Stielstra teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern and StoryStudio in Chicago and has written three books. In 2017, Chicago Review of Books named her book The Wrong Way to Save Your Life the nonfiction book of the year.
Faith Wilson Stein is the senior acquisitions editor (scholarly). She focuses on philosophy, literary studies, critical ethnic studies and performance studies. She also oversees long-running series such as Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and Studies in Russian Literature and Theory.
Iván Pérez, the acquistions coordinator, oversees literary studies and Latinx/Latin American studies. He also reads unsolicited manuscripts (aka the slush pile). He hasn’t hit gold there yet, but on occasion has found a manuscript that he likes even if it isn’t right for the Press. In those instances he’ll suggest another publisher to the author. Pérez is also a published author. In 2018, he published his first poetry chapbook, Para restarse.
Demystifying the industry
Jones, Stein, Siegel, Stielstra and Peréz see themselves as educators who try to demystify the publishing industry. They love interacting with students and unpublished authors at conferences, festivals and campus meetings. Siegel said, “We talk a lot about transparency with each other and with our authors. We want to give people information.”
The publishing industry is notoriously difficult to break into, but the Press has connections with former interns and employees who are in publishing companies all over the world. Those relationships are invaluable for helping the many graduate students who work part time at the press secure interviews and jobs.
Jones said that sometimes after one of their authors becomes more widely known and more successful, they are tempted by advances the press can’t match or afford. She reminds them the bigger publishing houses can offer money, not the hands-on attention the Press provides. The Press also keeps authors in print even if annual sales are sparse. They do a great deal of offset (traditional printing), in addition to print on demand. The Press holds a physical inventory of at least 300,000 books.
In a follow-up email, Jones wrote, “The full cost of producing a book at a university press is expensive, including printing, advertising, and press overhead, it comes to around $30,000, and Northwestern is in line with that. Furthermore, marketing and promotion have become more expensive, as publishers vie for shrinking space in review coverage and on shelves of major retailers. If we wanted access to the promotional resources that major UP’s [University Presses] and Trade houses work with, that cost-per-title could climb towards $50,000.”
Vaulting to the next level
Jones said the university remains committed to the Press and its commitment to aligning with the university’s mission. The university understands the challenges of being a press focused on the humanities. It provides an appropriation to help the press offset costs.
Jones believes an endowment of at least $10 million would secure the Press’s future. “What we hope to accomplish with an endowment is growing the Press both on a national and global level with publication, educational, and community outreach. Given our incredible history and backlist, we want to be on leveled financial ground with our esteemed and respected counterparts like Princeton University Press, MIT Press, Oxford University Press and others.”
Tiny but mighty: Northwestern University Press is a leader in humanities publishing is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.