Summary
Organization name
Deep Vellum Publishing
Causes
Arts & Humanities
Operating Budget
$1,000,000 - $2,999,999
Counties Served
Dallas
Equity Statement
Equity Statement
Address
3000 Commerce St.Dallas, TX 75226
Deep Vellum Publishing
A nonprofit organization
$6,326 raised by 42 donors
100% complete
$5,000 Goal
About
Recent Press
About Us
Deep Vellum has published over 1,200 books from writers from over 90 countries and dozens more from right here in Dallas and across Texas, and organized hundreds of literary events in our bookstore in Deep Ellum, and throughout the country. We're the only independent nonprofit publisher in the state of Texas, and we're proud to specialize in works by writers from underrepresented communities, work by Dallas and Texas-based writers and poets, and untold stories by literary artists across the globe, including Jim Schutze's long-out-of-print classic, The Accommodation, alongside works like Dhumketu's The Shenhai Virtuoso and Other Stories — the first ever literary translation from Gujarati published in the US — translated by DFW's own Jenny Bhatt — and Chernobyl Prayer by Nobel Prize for Literature-winner Svetlana Alexievich of Belarus, living in exile, translated by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait. Our mission is to bring the world into conversation through literature — and we mean it.
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, the books 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 giveaway 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.
- Deep Vellum wins the Dublin Literary Award: Mircea Cărtărescu's surrealist masterpiece Solenoid, translated by UT-Dallas professor Dr. Sean Cotter, was praised as one of the “best books of the year” by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, Financial Times and Words Without Borders in 2022 and recently won L.A. Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the author toured the US to rapturous sold-out crowds in San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Houston, and New York.
- 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
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