Stillhouse Press

Stillhouse Press began in early 2014, when a group of English department faculty and graduate students at George Mason University voted to start an independent nonprofit literary press. A 2015 Ploughshares interview names novelist Dallas Hudgens as its founder. The terms were unusual. Alumni, graduate students and undergraduates choose, edit, design and market the books, while faculty supervise without steering the editorial decisions. The press is based in Northern Virginia, and its releases carry a Fairfax dateline.

Its first book was Wendi Kaufman's story collection Helen on 86th Street and Other Stories, which appeared in autumn 2014 around the Fall for the Book festival. The press now belongs to Watershed Lit, George Mason's coalition of literary arts programs. Each year at least four MFA students hold paid assistantships there, and others work as interns in acquisitions, copyediting, design and marketing. So the books are made by people learning the trade, with real titles on the line.

The list covers fiction, nonfiction and poetry, from emerging and established writers. The press says it leans toward work that crosses genre lines or takes risks with form. Its biggest recent success is Amy Stuber's Sad Grownups, a debut collection of seventeen stories published in October 2024. It won the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a debut short story collection.

Other recent titles show the same taste for compact, first-time work. Leafskin is Miranda Schmidt's debut novel, about queer family-making. Three novellas, Paul Jaskunas's The Atlas of Remedies, Dennis James Sweeney's The Rolodex Happenings and Morgan Christie's Liddle Deaths, were also issued together as a boxed set.

A reader coming from Sad Grownups can expect a small, selective catalogue heavy on story collections, novellas and debuts. Many of these are books that larger houses might not have taken on.