Small presses are amplifying the work of immigrant authors in the U.S., even as they rethink the concept of immigrant writing. At Restless Books, Black Lawrence Press, and Academic Studies Press, first-generation American editors want to hear from writers with cross-cultural stories to tell.

Nonprofit indie Restless Books, based in Amherst, Mass., conducts Immigrant Writing Labs in partnership with public library systems including the New York Public Library. Its forthcoming What This Place Makes Me: Contemporary Plays on Immigration (Dec.), edited by Isaiah Stavchansky and introduced by Luis Valdez, collects seven plays by writers of Bengali, Korean, Lebanese, Mexican, Nigerian, and Polish descent. But the centerpiece of Restless Books’ advocacy, says publisher Ilan Stavans, is its $10,000 annual Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

Created in 2015, the prize is awarded to a work of fiction or memoir in alternating years. Rivka Galchen (Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch) and Priyanka Champaneri, whose The City of Good Death won the 2018 Restless prize, are judging the 2024 competition. Most recently, German émigré Catharina Coenen won the 2023 prize for her essay collection Unexploded Ordnance, and 2023 finalist Camille U. Adams, who hails from Trinidad, signed with Restless Books for her memoir How to Be UnMothered.

Entries have origins in Latin America, Asia, and the Arab world, though Stavans says he would like to get more voices from Africa, the Caribbean, and Palestine in the mix, as well as Dreamers and undocumented U.S. residents. “It’s rewarding to launch young, new voices coming from different ways of perceiving the immigrant experience,” he says, pointing out the nontraditional experimentation seen in many manuscripts. People are being “adventurous” in their language, he notes, playing with cadences and multilingual mash-ups like Spanglish to engage readers. “We’re looking to push the field in different directions.”

More recently, New York City’s Black Lawrence Press initiated its Immigrant Writing Series in 2022 with Arthur Kayzakian’s poetry collection The Book of Redacted Paintings, followed in 2024 by Aracelis González Asendorf’s stories of Cuba and Florida, Dressing the Saints, and Luisa A. Igloria’s Caulbearer, a poetry collection about the Philippines and its diaspora. Pakistani American author Maya Kanwal’s story collection Talking with Boys and Korean American adoptee Sasha Hom’s Sidework are scheduled for 2026.

Series director and Nigerian émigré Abayomi Animashaun came to BLP in 2010 with the publication of his Hudson Prize–winning poetry collection, The Giving of Pears. His editorial role developed after he pitched an anthology of essays by immigrant poets, Others Will Enter the Gates (2015), and through conversations with executive editor Diane Goettel. “The vision for the series began with that anthology,” Animashaun says. “It provided a base upon which we can build this initiative.”

The series is a self-standing, autonomous body of the press, and its editorial board—Animashaun, Ewa Chruschiel, Rigoberto González, and Sun Yung Shin—recommend selections to BLP. “We want to be as generous and as open as possible” to contributors, Animashaun says; the series welcomes submissions from “any immigrant author at any stage of their career.”

In Brookline, Mass., Academic Studies Press has announced an Immigrant Worlds and Texts series, set to debut in October with Memoirs of a Jewish Public Prosecutor from Soviet Ukraine by Mikhail Goldis, translated by Goldis’s grandson, Marat Grinberg. The series, vetted by an editorial board of international scholars, will be edited by Boston College professor Maxim D. Shrayer, whose 2023 memoir, Immigrant Baggage, was published by Cherry Orchard Press, ASP’s trade-oriented indie imprint. “I’m particularly keen on the legacy as seen through generations,” Shrayer says. “People somehow think the parents were the immigrants, and the children, the grandchildren, have lost the immigrant experience, whereas I think the real accumulation is in us, our children, now.”

Stavans of Restless Books seconds this assessment. “Very often it’s the children of immigrants who finally have the capacity to write, or the education, or the time to sit down and tell the stories,” he says. “We don’t force the message of what type of immigrant writing has to show up in the manuscript.” Instead, the goal should be to capture “the sensibility of moving to another place, of adapting to a new life, sometimes with a new language.”