We’re excited to share this year-end roundup of multi-genre anthologies, art and comic books, drama and performance books, cross-genre/hybrid books, and more published in 2025 by independent literary publishers! Read our year-end roundups of fiction, poetry, children’s books, and nonfiction as well.
Multi-Genre Anthologies
Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader
Seven Stories Press | January 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781644214459
Edited by Malu Halasa and Jordan Elgrably, this anthology of memoir, short stories, essays, book reviews, personal narrative, poetry, and visual art from The Markaz Review “honors the Palestinian spirit and its power in the face of dispossession and war.”
Tales from the Scrapyard (One ‘n Done #11) by Nicole Zamlout
Read Furiously | February 18, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-960869-18-0
This mixed-genre fantasy collection “creates an immersive mixed-media experience examining the very nature of the stories we choose to tell.”
Midwest Futures: Poems & Micro-Stories from Tomorrow’s Heartland
Middle West Press | March 4, 2025
ISBN: 978-1953665324
In this mixed-genre anthology edited by Randy Brown, thirty “emerging and established voices of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror tell fresh new narratives of environmental and social transformation set in the American Midwest.”
Jambu Press | April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780982467329
Edited by Virginia Barrett, this anthology “aims to capture some of the many ways poets, writers, and visual artists perceive and respond to blue in all its various names and shades.”
Best Literary Translations 2025
Deep Vellum | April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781646053735
This anthology edited by Noh Anothai, Wendy Call, Öykü Tekten, and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún “redefines the canon of global literatures in English translation, showcasing the brave and brilliant work of contemporary translators and editors.”
Capital Queer: A Pride Celebration from Washington Writers’ Publishing House
Washington Writers’ Publishing House | May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781941551516
This anthology “honoring the LGBTQ+ experience” features poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by Suzanne Feldman, Emily Holland, Kim Roberts, and more writers from Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC.
Wendy’s Subway | May 30, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9909878-6-9
Edited by Shoghig Halajian and Suzy Halajian, this multi-genre anthology “explores artists’ engagement with sites of physical dispossession and socio-ecological crisis.”
IHRAM Press | July 27, 2025
ISBN: 979-8292741404
This anthology of twenty-seven writers—edited by Lisa Zammit and Emily Mercer—features poetry and prose exploring “important issues concerning many young people: eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and the pervading presence of social media.”
Cryptids, Kaiju & Corn: Poems and Micro-Stories about Modern Midwest Monsters
Middle West Press | October 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781953665348
In this anthology edited by Randy Brown, over fifty writers “join to deliver fresh visions and explorations regarding the ‘forgotten’ terrain and deep recesses of the American Midwest.”
trace press | October 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781775256786
Edited by Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran, this experimental collection features editors, poets, and translators reflecting “on Tamil’s trajectory through classical poems, labour songs, feminist and Dalit poetry and poems of war and displacement.”
Disco Fries & Scenic Drives: Life in the Garden State
Read Furiously | October 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781960869227
In the third volume of the New Jersey anthology series, fiction, essays, photography, comics, and poetry “all come together to remind us of the wonderful and weird tales that make up the Garden State.”
Earthly Love 2.0: Stories of Intimacy and Devotion from Orion Magazine
Orion | November 1, 2025
ISBN: 9789533515342
Orion’s second anthology of “poetry and prose that illuminate the nature of love in the Anthropocene” includes a new foreword by Erica Berry and additional work by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ross Gay, Louise Glück, Mary Oliver, and more.
Our Best War Stories: Prize-winning Poetry & Prose from the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Awards
Middle West Press | November 4, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-953665-36-2
Edited by Christopher Lyke, this anthology is the second volume collecting prose and poetry from Line of Advance’s Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards and serves “to highlight some of the best contemporary voices writing about modern wars—from Vietnam, to Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Aunt Lute Books | November 7, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-951874-10-0
Edited by Norma E. Cantú, Dionne Espinoza, and Marisa Belausteguigoitia, this collection of Norma Alarcón’s work gathers “foundational essays by and interviews with one of the most highly esteemed intellectuals in Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Feminist Studies.”
Porque Estamos Aquí: Puerto Rican Feminisms Against Empire
The Feminist Press | November 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781558613607
Edited by Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón, this anthology of cross-genre works from Puerto Rican scholars, memoirists, artists, and activists “maps Boricua feminisms of the past, the present, and the future, defining what it means to be a ‘bad subject’ of US empire.”
Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds
Raven Chronicles Press | November 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-73547-809-8
According to Ursula Valdez, this multi-genre anthology edited by Susan Rich “brings to the stage 107 species of Washington birds in the words of ninety-eight talented poets and writers.”
Orison Books | December 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949039-69-6
The tenth volume of this multi-genre anthology—edited by Luke Hankins, Susanne Paola Antonetta, and Nathan Poole—collects “the finest spiritually engaged writing,” with both new and reprinted work from the preceding year.
PHX Oasis Press | December 10, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9937406-0-7
This anthology featuring fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from twenty-five Arizona writers explores “what we chase, what we flee from, and what slips through our fingers despite our best efforts.”
fwp 2025: an anthology of queer writing
fifth wheel press | December 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781969406010
This anthology features works by Rosie Accola, Rayne Alarcio, Chaia Alford, Stephanie Anderson, sterling-elizabeth arcadia, and more—all originally published in fifth wheel press’s online anthologies, brainrot and effervescent.
Art Books, Comic Books, and Illustration
Hunters in High Heels by Omar Rodríguez-López
Akashic Books | January 7, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63614-210-4
The photographs in this collection present an “elusive and evocative aesthetic that includes subjects such as highway signage, city skylines, and cloud formations, along with empty arenas and recording studios with friends and colleagues.”
Fearless Vampire Killers: The Bad Brains Photographs by Glen E. Friedman
Akashic Books | April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781636142081
This photography book “uniquely features almost every single Glen E. Friedman photograph of the Bad Brains, considered by many music fans to be the greatest and most influential American punk rock band of all time.”
The Grand Valley by Morgan Meis
Slant Books | August 26, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63982-199-0
In this book of art criticism, Meis “explores the art of Joan Mitchell and in particular one of her crowning achievements, the Grand Valley series.”
This Single Road: Postcards and Notebooks from Kyoto by Alan Chong Lau
Entre Ríos Books | September 23, 2025
ISBN: 978-0-9600457-8-5
In this book, Lau “opens his Kyoto journals to us—inexpensive pocket notebooks filled with quick sketches, poems, and fragments of daily life.”
Akashic Books | November 4, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63614-271-5
This collection is an “illuminating selection of photographs spanning iconic punk rock guitarist Brian Baker’s many years of global touring with Bad Religion, Dag Nasty, and other bands.”
Dickie Does America by Pieter de Poortere
Catalyst Press | November 11, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-963511-12-3
This satirical comic strip follows “Dickie, a Belgian yokel with good intentions but dubious critical thinking skills, navigating a modern world with inadequate emotional intelligence.”
Drama and Performance
Aristotle’s Wife by Claudia Barnett
Carnegie Mellon University Press | March 21, 2025
ISBN: 978-0-88748-712-5
Each short play in this collection “explores an imagined moment in the life of a little-known scientist sidelined by gender.”
Restless Books | April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781632062277
These seven plays by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Hansol Jung, Martyna Majok, Mona Mansour, Charlie Oh, Mfoniso Udofia, and Jesús I. Valles “herald a profound shift in what it means to be an American, an immigrant, and an artist on today’s stage.”
If This Were a Movie. . . by Almir Imširević
Translated from the Bosnian by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Laertes | May 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-942281-37-5
According to Dino Mustafić, this work of drama “depicts the author’s almost autobiographical relationship with the phenomenon of the siege.”
My Love is Water by Rob Macaisa Colgate
Ugly Duckling Presse | June 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946604-34-7
In this hybrid drama and poetry collection, Colgate “writes in rigorous and experimental verse to upend our understandings of desire, race, disability, and care.”
4 by Stefanovski and a 1 act by Goran Stefanovski
Translated from the Macedonian by Patricia Marsh-Stefanovska
Laertes | November 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-942281-36-8
According to Goce Smilevsk, Stefanovski’s drama “diagnoses the black hole of our time—the collective amnesia born out of the loss of one’s own story and the lack of interest in the story of the Other.”
4 by Malpede plus an Intervention by Karen Malpede
Laertes | November 8, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-942281-45-0
According to Marvin Carlson, these four plays “seek to bring us to our senses, intellectually, morally, and socially.”
My Excellency by Luis Rechani Agrait
Translated from the Spanish by William Carlos Williams
Swan Isle Press | November 10, 2025
ISBN: 978-1961056114
This play is a “political farce set in an ‘imaginary country’ that resembles Puerto Rico during the Great Depression, with its high unemployment and labor unrest.”
Some Monologues by Tyler Coburn
Wendy’s Subway | December 2, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9909878-7-6
According to Jill Magid, the monologues in Coburn’s book feature “a shared pursuit: how to locate agency within constraint, and how to turn the administrative or the technological into a site of intimacy.”
The Insulted Plays by Andrei Kureichik
Translated from the Russian by John Freedman
Laertes | December 11, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-942281-32-0
According to Valleri Robinson, “these plays evoke the horrors of the 21st century while maintaining a belief in our capacity for hope and love.”
Futures: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab Theater
Translated from the Arabic by Hisham Ben Khamsa, Jonas Elbousty, Caline Nasrallah, and Clem Naylor
53rd State Press | December 16, 2025
ISBN: 979-8986581491
According to Hilary Plum, these six plays by Yasser Abu Shaqra, Wael Kadour, Arzé Khodr, Rim Mejdi, Sami Nasr, and Leila Toubel “are preparing their audience, with love and imagination and lucid horror, for our own futures, grabbing our hands as the train picks up speed.”
Cross-Genre, Hybrid, and Other
Belle Point Press | February 11, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-960215-32-1
Part fiction and part memoir, this book “gathers a chorus of Southern neighbors from pockets of rural America.”
Verb Animate: Poetry and Prose from Collaborative Acts by Heid E. Erdrich
Trio House Press | 2025
ISBN: 978-1949487503
This collection of poems and reflections “explores the nuances and joys of Erdrich’s artistic collaborations with Twin Cities choreographers, visual artists, digital artists, and others.”
Ar:range:ments by Esther Kondo Heller
Fonograf Editions | March 11, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-964499-39-0
In this hybrid collection, Heller “creates textual and visual language that escapes the page to utter and speak past the record, the archive, and the document.”
Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone by Richard Fariña
Tough Poets Press | March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9798218602130
This new edition of Fariña’s collection of short stories, poems, essays, and song lyrics—first published posthumously in 1969—includes a foreword by Joan Baez and notes by Fariña’s wife, Mimi Fariña.
A Field of Telephones by Zach Savich
53rd State Press | April 1, 2025
ISBN: 979-8986581477
This cross-genre collection—a combination of “fictional lectures, performance texts, archival hijinks, and the personal”—“re-envisions what scholarship can offer during times of crisis in the humanities and in our own lives.”
The Heart Decided to Move by Melanie Bell
Read Furiously | April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781960869197
This mixed-genre collection “captures the author’s transformative journey as she takes the life-changing step of relocating to a new country.”
Reprise: Poems and Photographs by Golden
Haymarket Books | April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798888903056
The poems and portraits in this collection “reveal a stark vulnerability that invites readers to look deeply at times of great and, possibly, liberatory uncertainty.”
Hanging Loose Press | April 15, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9913377-0-0
According to Maggie Dubris, in this book combining poetry, fiction, and essay Henning “captures the delicate web of female friendships: intense, sometimes fragile, frequently sculpted by time and circumstance.”
Escape from the Fat Farm: Poetry and Prose by Sandy McIntosh
Marsh Hawk Press | May 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798987617779
According to Burt Kimmelman, McIntosh’s poems and essays “sketch primal scenes in which one or another ‘harmless impersonator’ steps forth from a menagerie of unreliable narrators.”
Wave Books | May 13, 2025
ISNB: 9798891060159
Composed from “daily writing practices and years of looping reductions and arrangements,” Meier’s collection of poem-essays “asks what it means to be in company.”
The Patient Body by Sebastian Matthews
Red Hen Press | May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781636282442
Matthews’ mosaic of short prose pieces “chronicles one man’s journey as he attempts to lead a balanced life as father, husband, friend, and literary citizen during traumatic times.”
dreamscapes I — betrayals (101 & 202 nights) by Sara Whym
Contra Mundum Press | May 31, 2025
ISBN: 9781940625737
Combining fiction, poetry, and theater, Whym’s trilogy begins when Maia “suddenly beholds the vision of Ondine, a child she had desired yet reluctantly aborted 23 years earlier.”
Tupelo Press | June 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961209-20-6
These poems and lyric essays “unearth the ways violence both disrupts and enables our ways of knowing—or approximating knowledge of—one another.”
Black Lesbian in White America and Other Writing by Anita Cornwell
Sinister Wisdom | June 3, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-944981-89-1
This new reprint of Cornwell’s 1983 essay collection includes previously unpublished poetry and an introduction by Briona Simone Jones as well as an interview between Cornwell and Audre Lorde.
Abode Press | July 1, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9900598-6-3
This hybrid poetry collection “weaves theories of survival and transformation in the face of negotiating rage, grief, pleasure, kinship, and the Korean diaspora.”
SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide by Cannupa Hanska Luger
Ayin Press | September 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-961814-26-4
In this hybrid book, Luger “transforms a 1970s military survival guide through poetic redaction, speculative fiction, and iterative line drawing—deftly surfacing and disrupting the colonial subconscious that haunts this vexed source text.”
The 3rd Thing | September 12, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7379258-8-0
The works in this hybrid project—containing four Yellow Songs books and the album Tender Revolutions—“reckon with the intimate consequences of the colonial project, reconfiguring them into complex and lucid, literal and figurative songs of selfhood.”
Malleable and True: A Hybrid Craft Anthology
Brink Books | September 15, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-7375795-8-8
This anthology of hybrid work “breaks open the concept of hybridity, finding space both inside genre and outside its boundaries, inviting readers, writers, and educators to explore the form’s multifaceted potential.”
Traceable Relation by Kimberly Alidio
Fonograf Editions | September 16, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-964499-42-0
This book is a “collection of linked essays and poems concerned with the vitality of art and writing in the wake of grief.”
Black Lawrence Press | September 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-62557-165-6
“With short prose pieces, lyric essays, and praise poems for G-tubes, nurses, and coworkers,” Frey’s chapbook “invites readers into a wakeful circle of suffering and small heroic gestures of care.”
Translated from the Bulgarian by Christopher Buxton, Zornitsa Hristova, and Rusana Bardarska
Open Letter Books | October 14, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-960385-45-1
“Rich with personal narrative and intellectual rigor,” this book is a “deeply engaging reflection on how we experience time, choose our paths, and leave traces of our existence in an increasingly globalized world.”
Tofu Ink Arts Press | October 25, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-958661-16-1
This collection of poetry and prose seeks to “operationalise this philosophy of l’écriture (also with a tip of the beret to Jacques Derrida), juxtaposing metafiction texts with prose poems, haikus and shorter verse.”
Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars by Jonathan González
Ugly Duckling Presse | November 1, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-946604-38-5
“Moving between archival fragments, rehearsal notes, and speculative memory,” this hybrid book “traces the embodied frequencies and assembled states of Black life.”
The Lesbian Body by Monique Wittig
Translated from the French by David Le Vay
Winter Editions | November 5, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-959708-16-2
In this “genre- and gender-breaking” work, Wittig “celebrates the body—lesbian, literary and defiantly political—and challenges the order of heterosexuality in literature.”
The Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Two Lines Press | November 11, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-949641-87-5
This biography of Mexican writer Elena Garro is a “portrait of a woman that also serves as an alternative history of Mexico City; a cry-out for justice; and an homage to the unknowable.”
Weaving Liberation: An Archival Chapbook by M. K. Thekkumkattil
Abode Press | November 15, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9900598-8-7
This hybrid chapbook “offers an archive and genuflection to the communities that have come together for Palestinian liberation.”
She Will Last as Long as Stones by kathy wu
Wendy’s Subway | November 18, 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9909878-8-3
This debut book “mines data from the United States Geological Survey, pairing it with (mis)translations of conversations with the author’s mother, narratives of racialized and gendered labor, and elegies on end-of-life care.”
Tributaries: Essays & Verses Flowing From & Celebrating Favorite Poems by Kurt Luchs
Sagging Meniscus | December 2, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-963846-47-8
In this book of poems and essays, Luchs “chooses twenty poems that hold vital meaning for him as a reader and writer—many, but not all, recognized as classics—and pays twofold tribute to them.”
Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir by Molly Gaudry
Rose Metal Press | December 9, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-941628-37-9
According to Melanie Rae Thon, in this hybrid-genre book Gaudry “exposes the illimitable unknowability of her astonishing selves, the endless potential for reinvention, and the strange gifts of isolation and fracture.”
Purple Ink Press | December 11, 2025
ISBN: 9798989279364
This collection of haikus and food photography is “a love letter—to the poet’s girlfriend, her Japanese heritage, and to the act of mindful eating itself.”
