About Us
Deep Vellum is a Dallas-based nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 to bring the world into conversation through literature. We are the only independent nonprofit publisher in Texas, dedicated to publishing underrepresented voices from around the globe and at home. Our catalog spans six imprints and now includes over 1,500 books, translated from 100 languages and written by authors from over 100 countries, including many titles that represent endangered and historically marginalized languages.
From our home in Deep Ellum, we’ve hosted more than 1,000 literary events across Dallas and the country, from bilingual readings and author talks to civic engagement panels and youth writing workshops. Our headquarters, bookstore, and venue serve as a vital cultural hub in Dallas’s historic Deep Ellum Cultural District, where literature and community meet daily.
We believe books are essential cultural tools—not just commercial products. As a nonprofit, we publish works for their artistic, educational, and social value, ensuring that readers of all ages, backgrounds, and identities can access diverse stories. Our model allows us to partner with schools, libraries, and cultural organizations to distribute free books, host free events, and make literature accessible to all.
Our mission is clear: to expand the literary landscape by uplifting voices that have too often been excluded from it. Through publishing, translation, education, and public programming, we deepen empathy, foster literacy, and create space for meaningful dialogue in Dallas and beyond.
Why is Deep Vellum a nonprofit?
Books are more than just dollar signs for Deep Vellum. Being a nonprofit publishing house allows us to publish books for their artistic and social value, books that are missing in the world today, highlighting the importance of the diversity of authors and styles and the free expression of ideas to change the world for readers in Dallas and around the world. But publishing books is expensive! Our nonprofit model allows us to apply for grants and receive donations to offset the expense of making books, supporting book tours, and selling Deep Vellum books at an affordable price point. Deep Vellum looks for what is missing in the world, and finds the storytellers to help us expand our ideas of what's possible.
Awards and Achievements
Deep Vellum continues to bring the world into conversation through literature, achieving national and international recognition for our publishing program and community impact.
Deep Vellum collaborated with Big D Reads to publish and distribute 30,000 copies of Jim Schutze’s The Accommodation, supporting more than 100 events across Dallas that fostered vital conversations about the city’s history of segregation and systemic racism.
Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees remains one of the most impactful titles in our catalog, becoming the fastest-selling book in Deep Vellum’s history. It has been widely recognized, including by The New Yorker as one of the best books of the year, and continues to resonate with readers as a powerful portrait of life amid conflict.
The Villain’s Dance by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, translated by Roland Glasser, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature and received widespread critical acclaim.
Recital of the Dark Verses by Luis Felipe Fabre, translated by Heather Cleary, won the 2024 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize for its imaginative scope and intellectual depth.
Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro, translated by Eve Hill-Agnus, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and won the 2024 Albertine Translation Prize.
Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter, won the 2024 Dublin Literary Award and was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, marking a historic milestone for Romanian literature in translation.
North Sun by Ethan Rutherford, published by Deep Vellum’s imprint A Strange Object, was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Fiction and recognized by The New York Times as the only finalist from a small press.
Deep Vellum titles were represented across the 2025 National Book Awards, with North Sun (Fiction finalist) and Terror Counter (Poetry longlist), demonstrating the breadth and strength of our publishing program.
Ultramarine and other Deep Vellum titles continue to receive national and international recognition, including major reviews, prizes, and festival features across the U.S. and abroad.
In addition to these honors, Deep Vellum is recognized as a leading force in producing global literature, with features in the New York Times, and local awards such as "Best Window to the World" by the Dallas Observer.
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Deep Vellum is a nonprofit publisher and literary arts center with the mission is to bring the world into conversation through literature. Here's why: Creating global conversation through literature builds cultural bridges, fosters empathy among individuals and communities, and allows us to view life from other perspectives.
We publish fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children's books by writers from around the globe and from our home base in Texas, and we host literary events to foster conversation around the critical themes our books address. Our books and the conversations they inspire harness the power of literature to envision a more equitable future.
More people! More donations to keep publishing the world's greatest writers! To reprint our bestsellers, and scale up to capacity that matches our work.
DEEP VELLUM EQUITY, DIVERSITY, ACCESSIBILITY, AND INCLUSION STATEMENT
VISION
From its origins, Deep Vellum has believed in bringing stories from the world to the world. In our programming and model, Deep Vellum builds a community of literary artists and staff members who seek to challenge what readers might think of history and sexuality, gender and race, ethnicity and nationality, class and ability in literature and publishing. In Dallas we strive to be a literary center that offers both a model and a set of literary tools that allow us to envision a more equitable future, and we strive to collaborate with literary artists and partner organizations worldwide to interrogate carefully what it means to tell the stories of all people, to speak to the world we live in here and now.
HISTORY AND GOALS
Historically, the publishing community has promoted the voices of heterosexual, male, white, abled, and well-off wealthy communities while marginalizing the voices and stories of other groups and individuals. Likewise, publishing companies have for too long been staffed by individuals who reflect these same publishing priorities and biases. Although this has begun to change as major and independent publishers begin to expand their publisher catalogs to include other voices, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, women, disabled, and low-income writers and storytellers are still largely underrepresented in the publishing world both as published writers and as staff members.
From its founding in 2013, Deep Vellum has pursued a different model, by building a community of writers, translators, and literary artists who hail from many different backgrounds. We are proud to present a publishing catalog that includes literary artists from a spectrum of racial and ethnic heritages, gender identities, sexual orientations, and nationalities, including books originally written in over 60 languages, by authors from over 80 countries, including those authors from Dallas and across Texas.
Yet for Deep Vellum, there is more work to be done. As we have grown from a staff of one to a larger organization, we must aim to ensure that our internal community, including our staff and board of directors, reflects the same diversity as our publishing list so that Deep Vellum can continue to build equity into the publishing world to ensure that everyone has a seat at the table.
Deep Vellum also commits to continuing to grow our reading audience, the audiences we serve through literary events, and our community of collaborative partners with the goal of making our programming accessible to new and different groups in Dallas and across the United States. For us, this means expanding the reach of our literary publishing and discussion-driven events programming to children and students and to people and communities that have been historically and intentionally excluded from literary programming.
As we expand our audience reach and our internal community, we are committed to continuing to build a list of published books and a roster of events that reflect the diversity of our world in order to amplify the stories of people everywhere.
Organization name
Deep Vellum Publishing
Causes
Arts & Humanities
Operating Budget
$1,000,000 - $2,999,999
Counties Served
Grayson, Wise, Tarrant, Somervell, Rockwall, Parker, Palo Pinto, Navarro, Montague, Kaufman, Johnson, Hunt, Hood, Fannin, Erath, Ellis, Denton, Dallas, Cooke, Collin
BIPOC Serving
Other, Native American, Hispanic or Latinx, Asian/Pacific Islander, Black or African American
BIPOC Leadership
Neither/None
Address
3000 Commerce St.