Orison Books is a volunteer-run, 501(c)3 non-profit literary press. We publish exceptional books that engage the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives. Literary excellence is always our foremost criterion, and we are not affiliated with any particular ideological standpoint. We are open and curious, and want our readers to be as well! We believe that the best spiritual writing calls us to meditate and contemplate, rather than asking us to adopt any ideology or set of propositions.
“The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.”
–Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Since publishing our first two titles in 2015, our books have garnered national attention in The New York Times Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Poets & Writers, Foreword Reviews, Booklist, The Chicago Tribune, The Jewish Review of Books, The Millions, The Rumpus, Lit Hub, and many other places. Our books have won national awards, including the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Essays and the Texas Institute of Letters’ Bob Bush Memorial Award for Poetry, and also have been named finalists for The Kate Tufts Discovery Award, The National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, The New Mexico Book Award in Poetry, and The Paterson Poetry Prize.
We’ve always depended on the support of donors to publish our unique and important books, and 2020 will be our most ambitious year yet! With your help, we can bring the following titles into the world:
We’ve taken on an ambitious number of titles for 2020, so it is possible that we will need to push publication dates for one or more of the titles to 2021 in order to raise the necessary funds or in order to handle the workload.