About Complicit Press
Publishing books that expose state violence, demand moral reckoning and amplify silenced voices.
There is a particular kind of silence that surrounds executions in America. It is not the silence of ignorance…most people know, in some abstract way, that the death penalty exists, that the state kills people in their name. It is the silence of distance, of carefully maintained comfort, of a system designed to make sure that what happens behind prison walls stays there. Complicit Press exists to break that silence. Our name is not an accident. To stay quiet about state violence is to be party to it. Publishing is how we refuse.
Our Mission and Affiliation
We are the nonprofit publishing imprint of the Execution Intervention Project (EIP), an organization built around the belief that every person facing execution deserves to be seen, fought for and heard. EIP works at the intersection of legal advocacy, direct intervention and public education. Complicit Press is its literary arm…the place where the stories that don’t fit into briefs or clemency petitions find their form. Books. Long, careful, unsparing books that ask readers to sit with what this country does and why and what it costs.
Our Series
The Abolition Series
The Abolition Series takes the long view. These are books concerned with the architecture of capital punishment…how it was built, who it was built for and what it would mean to tear it down. They draw on legal history, sociology, moral philosophy and investigative reporting to make the case that the death penalty is not a policy question to be debated at arm’s length, but a living injustice that touches real people and demands a real response.
The Abolition Series is for readers who want to understand not just the what, but the how and the why: how innocent people end up on death row, how race and poverty determine who lives and who dies, how a society tells itself that state-sanctioned killing is justice.
The Intervention Series
The Intervention Series works at a different register. These are books about specific cases…individual people, individual decisions, individual moments of reckoning. They document what it looks like when the machinery of execution moves toward someone: the appeals that fail, the evidence that surfaces too late, the clemency hearings where a board of officials must decide whether a life is worth saving.
They follow lawyers working impossible hours, families living in cycles of grief and hope and the men and women on death row themselves…their letters, their memories, their understanding of what has been done to them and what they have done. The Intervention Series insists, above all else, that each of these people is more than a case number. More, even, than their worst moment.
Our Approach
What distinguishes Complicit Press from a conventional publisher is not only what we publish but how we exist. We are a nonprofit operation, which means our decisions are not made by market logic. We do not ask whether a book will sell to the widest possible audience. We ask whether a book needs to exist…whether it carries testimony that would otherwise go unrecorded, whether it illuminates a corner of this system that has been allowed to stay dark.
Every dollar generated from our book sales goes directly back into EIP’s work: supporting people on death row, funding legal interventions, pushing for clemency and building the infrastructure of abolition. When you buy a book from Complicit Press, you are not a consumer. You are a participant.
What We Are Looking For
We are actively seeking manuscripts and book proposals. We want to hear from researchers who have spent years inside this system. We want to hear from journalists who have sat in courtrooms and watched justice fail. We want to hear from lawyers and social workers and chaplains and prison guards…from anyone who has stood close enough to an execution to know what it smells like, who has something to say that they cannot stop needing to say.
And we especially want to hear from people with lived experience: those who have been incarcerated, those who have lost someone to violence, those who have lost someone to the state. The voices closest to this system are the ones most often excluded from the books written about it. That is exactly what we are here to change.
We do not require prior publishing experience. We do not require an agent. We require honesty, rigor and the willingness to put something true on the page. What makes a Complicit Press book is not a particular style or credential…it is a refusal to look away. That refusal is the beginning of everything we do.
Why Literature Matters
The death penalty in America is sustained, in no small part, by the story that society tells itself about it: that it is reserved for the worst of the worst, that it is applied fairly, that it is a last resort arrived at through careful and impartial deliberation. Literature has the power to put pressure on that story…to complicate it, to contradict it, to replace it with something closer to the truth.
That is what Complicit Press is for. Not to document suffering for its own sake, but to make suffering impossible to ignore. To make readers responsible for what they now know. To transform the distance that makes complicity easy into proximity that makes it impossible.
We publish books that bear witness. We publish books that demand something of readers. We publish because the alternative…silence…is a choice we are not willing to make.
Submissions
We are seeking manuscripts and book proposals about death sentences, executions and death penalty cases…including research and lived experience. No prior publishing experience required. Email [email protected]. Proceeds from all book sales fund EIP’s mission.
Visit our website @ https://www.executionintervention.org/complicitpress
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