New York University Press has been committed to publishing high-quality works since its inception in 1916. In 1952, the Press began to focus solely on scholarly books with the assistance of then director Filmore Hyde.
During the 1960s the Press published one of its most well-known titles, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman. The 1980s and 1990s saw the Press grow in several directions, publishing works in psychology, gender studies, law, African American studies, Asian American studies, and Latino/a studies.
Award-Winning Highlights
Winner, 2025 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award
Coloring into Existence
Argues that queer picture books with main characters of color can disrupt structures of power in both literature and real life
Coloring into Existence investigates the role of authors, illustrators, and independent publishers in producing alternative narratives that disrupt colonial, heteropatriarchal notions of childhood. These texts or characters unsettle the category of the child, and thus pave the way for broader understandings of childhood. Often unapologetically politically motivated, queer and trans of color picture books can serve as the basis for fantasizing about disruptions to structures of power, both within and outside literary worlds.
Winner, 2024 Victorian Society Book of the Year
Brooklynites
Meet the Black Brooklynites who defined New York City’s most populous borough through their search for social justice
This cultural and social history is told through four ordinary families from Brooklyn’s nineteenth-century free Black community: the Crogers, the Hodges, the Wilsons, and the Gloucesters. The book illustrates the depth and scope of their activism, cementing Brooklyn’s place in the history of social justice movements. Their lives offer valuable lessons on freedom, democracy, and family—both the ones we’re born with and the ones we choose. Their powerful stories continue to resonate today, as borough residents fill the streets in search of a more just city.
Category Winner, 2025 PROSE Awards: Psychology and Applied Social Work
Private Violence
How the US asylum process fails to protect against claims of gender-based violence
Private Violence provides much-needed recommendations for incorporating a gender-based lens in the asylum process. The authors demonstrate how policy changes across Presidential administrations have made it difficult for survivors of “private violence” to qualify for asylum. Private Violence paints a damning portrait of America’s broken asylum system. This volume illustrates the difficulties experienced by Latin American women who rely on this broken system for protection in the United States. It also illuminates women’s resilience and the determination of immigration attorneys to reshape asylum law.
Making common cause with the best and the brightest, the great and the good, NYU Press aspires to nothing less than the transformation of the intellectual and cultural landscape. Infused with the conviction that the ideas of the academy matter, we foster knowledge that resonates within and beyond the walls of the university.
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