We’re excited to share this year-end roundup of multi-genre anthologies, art and comic books, drama and performance books, and more published in 2023 by independent literary publishers! (Read our year-end roundups for fiction, poetry, children’s books, and nonfiction as well.)
Multi-Genre Anthologies
The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language
Restless Books | February 14, 2023
Edited by Ilan Stavans, this anthology features “essays, letters, poems, songs, speeches, stories, jeremiads, manifestos, and decrees across history” demonstrating “the diversity, strangeness, and power of American English.”
Holding Patterns: A Collection of Words on Ritual
Good Printed Things | March 15, 2023
Edited by Beth Ables and Angie Toole Thompson, this anthology features poems, prose, and short stories “on rituals of every kind, and the ways that they save us, challenge us, and utterly shape who we are.”
A Night of Screams: Latino Horror Stories
Arte Público Press | March 31, 2023
Edited by Richard Z. Santos, this anthology of horror stories and poems “contains themes impacting Latinos, such as cartel violence and immigration.”
South to South: Writing South Asia in the American South
Texas Review Press | June 15, 2023
The short stories and narrative essays in this anthology edited by Khem K. Aryal “compose a mosaic of South Asian lived experiences in the American South.”
Rose Metal Press | July 18, 2023
Edited by Kelcey Ervick and Tom Hart, this anthology “gives readers unprecedented insight into the techniques of 28 of today’s most innovative creators of poetry comics, graphic narratives, and image-text hybrids.”
BLF Press | September 5, 2023
Edited by Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle, this multi-genre anthology “encompasses a broad spectrum of literary writing on Black joy.”
Translated from the French
Two Lines Press | September 26, 2023
In Elektrik, “eight women writers from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe come together to explore, in poetry and prose, the complex nature of Caribbean existence.”
great weather for MEDIA | August 1, 2023
A Shape Produced by a Curve is “an invigorating collection of contemporary poetry and short fiction from established and emerging writers across the United States and beyond.”
Watershed Press | October 1, 2023
Edited by Jason Wirth, Paul E. Nelson, and Adelia MacWilliam, this anthology asks, “Is there a connection between Zen practice, broadly construed, and the Cascadia bioregion?”
Closer to Freedom: Prose & Poetry From Maximum Security
Woodhall Press | October 2, 2023
In this anthology edited by Chris Belden, “dozens of incarcerated men share poems, stories, and essays that celebrate the power of the written word.”
Connecticut Literary Anthology 2023: Celebrating Authors From the Nutmeg State
Woodhall Press | October 3, 2023
Edited by Victoria Buitron, this anthology collects poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by dozens of Connecticut writers.
G.I. Days: An Anthology of Military Life
Milltown Press | November 28, 2023
The twenty-nine stories and poems in this anthology edited by Mary Senter “give a glimpse into the lives of a diverse cross-section of U.S. military-connected writers, from Vietnam veterans to current military spouses.”
Art Books and Illustration
I Will Keep My Soul by Helen Cammock
Siglio Press | April 21, 2023
I Will Keep My Soul is “an orchestral layering of photography, historical documents, poetry and interviews, rooted in the history, geography and community of New Orleans.”
Tursulowe Press | April 21, 2023
These photographs of readers “span over four decades and a half a dozen continents. Some capture a still or tranquil space, while some are more energetic, even raucous.”
Roots, Stones and Baggage by Richard Brown Lethem
Bamboo Dart Press | April 22, 2023
This collection features paintings and poems from seventy years of Lethem’s life, “written and painted in Missouri, Paris, Brooklyn, Maine, and California.”
Bait the Toad by Kendra Powers
Catalyst Press | October 7, 2023
In this book of photographs, a “tiny toad has a lot to teach us all about being comfortable in our own skin.”
Comic Books
The Woman Who Was Forced to Draw Cats for a Living by Nicole Hollander
Woodhall Press | June 6, 2023
This book is a collection of humorous comics by the author of Female Problems and My Cat’s Not Fat, He’s Just Big-Boned.
Drama and Performance
Embarrassed of the (W)Hole by Panoply Performance Laboratory
Ugly Duckling Presse | March 1, 2023
An “operating manual for an opera-of-operations,” this book includes “scores-for-scores, theoretical frames, process notes, and a User Survey meant to be ‘operated’ and ‘used’ (specifically, rigorously) to stage and situate pertinent contexts, conditions, and embodiments of and for projected future operations.”
Hoppla, We’re Alive by Ernst Toller
Translated from the German by Drew Lichtenberg
Berlinica Publishing | May 1, 2023
This play from the Weimar Republic is “a powerful portrait of a fragile democracy at war with itself, inevitably corrupted from within by the rising forces of capitalism and fascism.”
Translated from the English by Alexandra Viteri Arturo and Alejandra Martorell
53rd State Press | June 1, 2023
Guía de campo de iLANDing is a Spanish-language translation of A Field Guide to iLANDing, published in 2017 by 53rd State Press.
All These Things by Sharon Bridgforth & Daniel Alexander Jones
53rd State Press | June 21, 2023
Bridgforth and Jones hold “an intimate and searching conversation about the pragmatics of making art and engaging the communities—living and ancestral—from which their work emerges.”
Mahabharata by Ravi Jain and Miriam Fernandes
Coach House Books | September 5, 2023
According to Robert Lepage, in this dramatic retelling of Mahabharata, “the 4,000-year-old Sanskrit poem comes to life and feels more universal than ever.”
SKiNFoLK: An American Show by Jillian Walker
53rd State Press | October 17, 2023
SKiNFoLK: An American Show is “a quilted ritual of liberation, bearing witness to the playwright-performer’s identity, heritage and legacy as a Black woman in this America.”
Angela’s Mixtape + The History of Light by Eisa Davis
53rd State Press | November 16, 2023
In Angela’s Mixtape, “time shifts like a mixtape, and like a mixtape, the play is both a memoir and a gift”; The History of Light is “a study in black and white, love and alienation.”
Emergency INDEX, An Annual Document of Performance Practice: Volume 10
Ugly Duckling Presse | December 15, 2023
In this annual anthology “open to all who work with performance,” contributors “document works made in the previous year.”
