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. In 1963, the Press published Viola 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. The 1960s also saw the beginnings of the Northwestern University Press-Newberry Library alliance in publishing the definitive edition of the writings of Herman Melville in conjunction with the Modern Language Association. In 1992, Northwestern University Press and TriQuarterly magazine partnered to establish the TriQuarterly Books imprint, dedicated to contemporary American fiction and poetry. In 2010, Northwestern University Press acquired the publisher of international literature and Latin American voices, Curbstone Press.
Notable Publications
Northwestern University Press publishes a wide range of theater titles. Anchored by Viola Spolin's Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques, Northwestern's theater list includes works by Tony and Academy Award winners such as Mary Zimmerman, Tracy Letts, Bruce Norris, and Horton Foote, as well as playwrights David Ives, Craig Wright, and Ike Holter.
Honors
The Press has received many accolades, including major translation awards for Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Writer's Diary: Volume I, 1873–1876, translated by Kenneth Lantz; Ignacy Krasicki's Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, translated by Thomas H. Hoisington; and Petra Hůlová's All This Belongs to Me: A Novel, translated by Alex Zucker. In 1997 the Press won the National Book Award for Poetry for William Meredith's Effort at Speech, followed by a 2011 win for Nikky Finney's Head Off & Split. Several of the Press's titles, including Fording the Stream of Consciousness, Still Waters in Niger, and The Book of Hrabal, have been named Notable Books by The New York Times Book Review. The Press published two novels by the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature, Hungarian author Imre Kertész. Florida, a novel by Christine Schutt, was a finalist for a National Book Award in 2004. Northwestern University Press published Herta Müller's novel Traveling on One Leg which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. NU Press's "Forest Primeval" won the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Patricia Smith'sIncendiary Art won the same award in 2019. Also for "Incendiary Art", Patricia Smith won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry in 2018.
