Summary
Organization name
Deep Vellum Publishing
Causes
Arts & Humanities
Operating Budget
$1,000,000 - $2,999,999
Counties Served
Dallas
Address
3000 Commerce St.Dallas, TX 75226
Deep Vellum Publishing
A nonprofit organization
$10,525 raised by 3 donors
100% complete
$5,000 Goal
About
Recent Press
About Us
Deep Vellum is a Dallas-based nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 to bring the world into conversation through literature. We are the only independent nonprofit publisher in Texas, dedicated to publishing underrepresented voices from around the globe and at home. Our catalog spans six imprints and now includes over 1,500 books, translated from 100 languages and written by authors from over 100 countries, including many titles that represent endangered and historically marginalized languages.
From our home in Deep Ellum, we’ve hosted more than 1,000 literary events across Dallas and the country, from bilingual readings and author talks to civic engagement panels and youth writing workshops. Our headquarters, bookstore, and venue serve as a vital cultural hub in Dallas’s historic Deep Ellum Cultural District, where literature and community meet daily.
We believe books are essential cultural tools—not just commercial products. As a nonprofit, we publish works for their artistic, educational, and social value, ensuring that readers of all ages, backgrounds, and identities can access diverse stories. Our model allows us to partner with schools, libraries, and cultural organizations to distribute free books, host free events, and make literature accessible to all.
Our mission is clear: to expand the literary landscape by uplifting voices that have too often been excluded from it. Through publishing, translation, education, and public programming, we deepen empathy, foster literacy, and create space for meaningful dialogue in Dallas and beyond.
Why is Deep Vellum a nonprofit?
Books are more than just dollar signs for Deep Vellum. Being a nonprofit publishing house allows us to publish books for their artistic and social value, books that are missing in the world today, highlighting the importance of the diversity of authors and styles and the free expression of ideas to change the world for readers in Dallas and around the world. But publishing books is expensive! Our nonprofit model allows us to apply for grants and receive donations to offset the expense of making books, supporting book tours, and selling Deep Vellum books at an affordable price point. Deep Vellum looks for what is missing in the world, and finds the storytellers to help us expand our ideas of what's possible.
Awards and Achievements
- Deep Vellum collaborated with Big D Reads to publish and give away 30,000 copies of Jim Schutze’s The Accommodation for over 100 Big D Reads events. This helped engage our community in an important dialogue about the suppressed history of segregation and racism in Dallas.
- Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees has quickly gained acclaim and became the fastest-selling book in Deep Vellum's history. In 2022, the New Yorker cited it as one of the “best books of the year” and recently won the National Book Critics Circle award. Grey Bees offers readers a portrait of modern conflict in Ukraine.
🏆 The Villain’s Dance by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, translated by Roland Glasser, was a 2024 National Book Award Finalist for Translated Literature and earned rave reviews in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Words Without Borders.
🏆 Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre, translated by Heather Cleary, won the 2024 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize, praised for its imaginative range and scholarly depth.
🏆 Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro, translated by Eve Hill-Agnus, won the 2024 Albertine Prize for Fiction, awarded by the Villa Albertine and the French Embassy.
🏆 Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by UTD's Dr. Sean Cotter, won the 2024 Dublin Literary Award, the L.A. Times Book Prize, and was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize—the first Romanian novel to receive this honor.
🏆 Little Seed by Wei Tchou was named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024 and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
🏆 Trash, translated by Allison Markin Powell and Yuka Igarashi, won the World Literature Today Discovery Prize.
🏆 In early 2025, Deep Vellum announced a historic agreement to acquire Open Letter Books, one of the nation’s most celebrated translation publishers. This acquisition will further expand Deep Vellum's catalog and impact.
- Our CEO Will Evans was knighted by the French government!
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Giving Activity
Mission
Deep Vellum is a nonprofit publisher and literary arts center with the mission is to bring the world into conversation through literature. Here's why: Creating global conversation through literature builds cultural bridges, fosters empathy among individuals and communities, and allows us to view life from other perspectives.
We publish fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children's books by writers from around the globe and from our home base in Texas, and we host literary events to foster conversation around the critical themes our books address. Our books and the conversations they inspire harness the power of literature to envision a more equitable future.
Needs
More people! More donations to keep publishing the world's greatest writers! To reprint our bestsellers, and scale up to capacity that matches our work.
Equity Statement
DEEP VELLUM EQUITY, DIVERSITY, ACCESSIBILITY, AND INCLUSION STATEMENT
VISION
From its origins, Deep Vellum has believed in bringing stories from the world to the world. In our programming and model, Deep Vellum builds a community of literary artists and staff members who seek to challenge what readers might think of history and sexuality, gender and race, ethnicity and nationality, class and ability in literature and publishing. In Dallas we strive to be a literary center that offers both a model and a set of literary tools that allow us to envision a more equitable future, and we strive to collaborate with literary artists and partner organizations worldwide to interrogate carefully what it means to tell the stories of all people, to speak to the world we live in here and now.
HISTORY AND GOALS
Historically, the publishing community has promoted the voices of heterosexual, male, white, abled, and well-off wealthy communities while marginalizing the voices and stories of other groups and individuals. Likewise, publishing companies have for too long been staffed by individuals who reflect these same publishing priorities and biases. Although this has begun to change as major and independent publishers begin to expand their publisher catalogs to include other voices, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, women, disabled, and low-income writers and storytellers are still largely underrepresented in the publishing world both as published writers and as staff members.
From its founding in 2013, Deep Vellum has pursued a different model, by building a community of writers, translators, and literary artists who hail from many different backgrounds. We are proud to present a publishing catalog that includes literary artists from a spectrum of racial and ethnic heritages, gender identities, sexual orientations, and nationalities, including books originally written in over 60 languages, by authors from over 80 countries, including those authors from Dallas and across Texas.
Yet for Deep Vellum, there is more work to be done. As we have grown from a staff of one to a larger organization, we must aim to ensure that our internal community, including our staff and board of directors, reflects the same diversity as our publishing list so that Deep Vellum can continue to build equity into the publishing world to ensure that everyone has a seat at the table.
Deep Vellum also commits to continuing to grow our reading audience, the audiences we serve through literary events, and our community of collaborative partners with the goal of making our programming accessible to new and different groups in Dallas and across the United States. For us, this means expanding the reach of our literary publishing and discussion-driven events programming to children and students and to people and communities that have been historically and intentionally excluded from literary programming.
As we expand our audience reach and our internal community, we are committed to continuing to build a list of published books and a roster of events that reflect the diversity of our world in order to amplify the stories of people everywhere.
Media gallery
Organization Data
Dallas, TX 75226