Winner of the 2023 AWP Small Press Publisher Award
We’re honored to announce that Dzanc Books has been honored as winner of the 2023 AWP Small Press Publisher Award! This is an annual prize given each year to nonprofit presses and literary journals in recognition of the labor, creativity, resourcefulness, and innovation of small publishers.
Michelle Dotter, Dzanc’s editor-in-chief, said of the prize: “This is deeply humbling, all the more so because we were nominated for this award by our authors. There can be no greater honor than knowing they’re proud to call Dzanc home.”
Dotter added, “I’ve been with the press for about ten years. When I took this job, I took it for the same reasons a lot of us in publishing end up where we are: because I was broke and had to pay my rent. It took me a while to understand what I’d stumbled on: an independent, nonprofit press devoted to thorny, difficult, brilliant, rule-breaking literature. Thanks to founders Steve Gillis and Dan Wickett, indefatigable champions, Dzanc has remained a press that publishes books because they deserve to be published, not because they’re written to the market. In an increasingly market-driven industry, that’s something worth celebrating.”
At its founding, Dzanc Books was hailed as “the future of publishing” in Publishers Weekly in December 2007. Beginning with modest goals of publishing four to six titles each year, the house now publishes between ten to fifteen books annually. Notable and award-winning authors include Charles Johnson (National Book Award), Lindsey Drager (Shirley Jackson Award winner, Lambda Literary Award finalist), Chaya Bhuvaneswar (PEN/Bingham Award finalist), Josip Novakovich (finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize), and Lee Martin (Pulitzer Prize finalist).
In the thirteen years since its founding, Dzanc has published over 224 original works, including 87 works by debut authors. We’ve restored more than 290 titles that were either out of print or unavailable through the Dzanc rEprint series. In 2011, Dzanc Books also founded the Disquiet International Literary Program, a two-week annual workshop in Lisbon, Portugal. Past guests of honor and instructors include Colson Whitehead, George Saunders, Denis Johnson, Sam Lipsyte, and Tayari Jones. The press is also working to establish a Dzanc writing residency in Greenfield, MA, and a low-cost Dzanc Mentorship Program for aspiring writers.
Dotter concluded, “For so many of us in small press publishing, the work we do is a passion project. It’s work that takes a lot out of you, but it gives a lot back as well. And it means a great deal to be recognized by this larger community of people who believe in the same things.”