Ready to Pitch Your Book? Don’t Sleep on Academic Presses

Contrary to popular belief, university publishing houses are not just for scholars—they also publish poetry, fiction, memoir and more.

Photo by Jessica Bal/Narratively archive

I was recently enjoying Timothy C. Baker’s Reading My Mother Back: A Memoir in Childhood Animal Stories, a spellbinding meditation on grief and narrative, when I flipped to the back cover and saw the book had been published by MIT Press in 2022. I was surprised because I had no idea that academic presses like MIT published memoirs.

I first became familiar with university presses when I was a graduate student in English several moons ago. Knowing a “UP” book was necessary for tenure and hoping to one day become a professor, I expected to adapt my dissertation for such a press. It would be a highly specialized work for other literary scholars — a book my parents would proudly display but never read. It wasn’t until reading Baker’s book, having long since left academia for journalism and publishing two nonfiction books of my own, that I realized these presses also publish memoir, essay and short story collections, fiction and poetry. 

I became even …