Meet Our Grantee-Partner: Nightboat Books
By uniting new and rediscovered writing, Nightboat Books fosters an expansive discourse across 20th- and 21st-century queer, experimental, and transgressive literature.
Kazim Ali reading at a Nightboat event in Upstate New York, 2025. Photo courtesy of Nightboat Books.
Mission: Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization, seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries, by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence and risk.
Nightboat Books was founded in 2004 in Beacon, New York, by poets Kazim Ali and Jennifer Chapis with a vision of publishing innovative writing across traditions and a commitment to both new and out-of-print works. Over the course of two decades, Nightboat has published more than 250 titles spanning style and genre by emerging and established writers, as well as archival works by writers who were overlooked during their lifetimes or whose work has gone out of print.
By publishing experimental poetry, and by operating from a nonprofit perspective that prioritizes mission over sales, Nightboat opens and investigates language—which then informs new possibilities of living and being in a late capitalist world. The press investigates how ruptures in form and technique can reveal hidden truths, or make otherwise inaccessible observations.
Nightboat's catalog includes writing on the AIDS epidemic, eco-poetics, revolutionary literature, queer and trans writing, migration, healing and disability, Black poetics, Asian diasporic experience, and the New Narrative movement. By uniting new and rediscovered writing, Nightboat fosters an expansive discourse across 20th- and 21st-century queer, experimental, and transgressive literature—tracing formal lineages across generations and bringing in urgently needed new literary perspectives each year.
A leading voice in queer experimental writing for decades, Nightboat published Troubling the Line in 2013, edited by TC Tolbert and Trace Peterson, the first collection of contemporary poetry by trans and genderqueer writers. Nightboat has also been committed to publishing work on AIDS, collecting and reissuing out-of-print works by writers who died of AIDS-related illness and publishing new work by contemporary writers, such as Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter, Unbound by Aaron Shurin, and Don't Leave Me This Way by Eric Sneathen.
Nightboat serves readers locally, regionally, and nationally by hosting or participating in 35-50 events annually, including book fairs, readings, launches, screenings, and more, the majority of which are free to the public. Collaborations with peer organizations and partner venues helps Nightboat authors reach new audiences. Nightboat also provides free desk copies of its titles for instructors, and Nightboat books are taught in courses on experimental and queer poetics, new works in translation, queer criticism and theory, and more.
Inaugural Nightboat Editorial Fellow Naima Yael Tokunow at the book launch for Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive. Photo courtesy of Nightboat Books.
Nightboat seeks to be a resource for professional development, resource-sharing, and coalition-building for emerging editors, small presses, and writers at all stages of their career. The press supports its authors as they find their distinct subject and approach, and the variety within its catalogue allows each new title to incorporate into a literary discourse. This ecosystemic approach to publishing prioritizes experimentalism over any one subject, and in doing so continually pushes the editorial perspective and encourages writers to pursue the material of their choosing.
One way Nightboat fosters professional development is through its Editorial Fellowship, which supports an emerging BIPOC editor with a $10,000 honorarium over the course of two years. The fellow receives resources and mentorship to develop a book project of their choice, culminating in the publication of that project with Nightboat. In 2025, Nightboat published inaugural fellow Naima Yael Tokunow’s anthology Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive, which brought together more than 40 contributors from 600+ submissions.
Receiving a general operating support grant from the Poetry Foundation allowed Nightboat to continue publishing experimental poetry in 2026, and provided the necessary resources to maintain and even expand programming after the loss of National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funding. Nightboat has been working towards its current strategic plan goals, which focus on resilience, organizational professionalization, and documentation of editorial structures. The grant facilitated a renewed energy and increased staff time devoted to these goals.
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