About

A Public Space is an independent nonprofit publisher of an eponymous award-winning literary, arts, and culture magazine, and A Public Space Books. Under the direction of founding editor Brigid Hughes since 2006, it has been our mission to seek out overlooked and unclassifiable work, and to publish writing from beyond established confines. Subscribe today, and join the conversation.

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History

2020

Tolstoy Together, a virtual book club to read War and Peace with Yiyun Li, launches on March 18, 2020. The experience—an 85-day collective journey through an epic novel with thousands of readers across six continents—would later be compiled in the book Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li. APS Together, a new series of virtual book clubs, launches in June 2020.

2019

The Editorial Fellowship is established.

2018

A Public Space Books is established.

A Public Space is awarded the inaugural Literary Magazine Prize from the Whiting Foundation for “stand[ing] as a paradigm of what literary magazines can be.”

Editor Brigid Hughes and A Public Space receive the Colophon Award for Paradigm Independent Publishing from CLMP (Community of Literary Magazines and Presses).

The Deborah Pease Prize is established to honor the legacy of A Public Space’s founding benefactor.

Jamel Brinkley’s debut story collection, A Lucky Man (A Public Space/Graywolf), is a finalist for the National Book Award.

2017

Dorthe Nors’s novel Mirror, Shoulder Signal (A Public Space/Graywolf), translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra, is a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.

2015

A Public Space No. 23, a tenth-anniversary issue of the magazine exploring a generation of women writers and artists, and questions of anonymity and erasure in art, is published.

2014

The Writing Fellowships—a program to support writers at the start of their careers—is established.

2012

Graywolf Press announces a partnership with A Public Space to publish books by contributors to the magazine. The titles published through the partnership would include: Karate Chop, So Much for That Winter, and Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors; Cities I’ve Never Lived In by Sara Majka; The Complete Ballet by John Haskell; and A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley.

2011

Editor Brigid Hughes receives the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing.

Monkey Business, an annual anthology edited by Motoyuki Shibata showcasing contemporary Japanese literature, which developed from a portfolio in the debut issue of A Public Space, debuts. A Public Space would serve as the co-publisher for seven editions of Monkey Business. In 2020, the publication would relaunch as Monkey: New Writing from Japan.