53rd State Press was founded in 2007 as a one-person venture to preserve and distribute new performance writing by a small, flourishing community of writers in Brooklyn. Between 2007 and 2010, it published seven books.

Now, after a year-long pause to rethink operation modalities with a longer-term view, 53rd State is returning in the standard key of the 21st century: sustainability. Co-edited and co-administered by Karinne Keithley Syers and Antje Oegel, the press has:

--incorporated
--begun the process of becoming a non-profit organization
--adopted a debt-free business model

In a time when the economic good sense of business models based on large initial debt is justly under reconsideration, and a time when the entire structure of the publishing world is undergoing profound changes, we have chosen to adopt a modest model that essentially reverts to an 18th century publishing strategy: subscription. While 53rd State books will also circulate within the existing models of book distribution, our primary aim is to publish each season's catalog for a base of subscribers. The size of our subscription audience will dictate the size our output.

We ask you to subscribe either to individual titles or the entire season catalog not because subscription offers massive discounts (though it does discount the titles), but because you, as a reader, are a member of the community. There is very little representation in print of new writing for performance. Many of these texts live in public only for the duration of a one or two-weekend performance run. Not geared toward commercial theater and not specific to the purview of university presses, the invention and beauty of the work in new writing for performance often vanishes, existing only in the memories of those who sat in the audience during those short runs. 53rd State Press exists as a vehicle for the preservation of this writing, and we need your support to do this work.

Working on a September-June calendar, we will be publishing 4 new texts a year. Our curatorial range includes new writing for performance -- in theater, dance, and spaces in-between -- as well as new plays in translation. Our catalog will generally include three smaller volumes and one 3-play anthology. Titles will be available in all ebook forms in addition to traditional print.