Louisiana State University Press

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The Louisiana State University Press, founded in 1935, is a nonprofit book publisher dedicated to the publication of scholarly, general interest, and regional books. As an integral part of Louisiana State University, the Press shares the university’s goal of the dissemination of knowledge and culture. LSU Press is one of the oldest and largest university presses in the southern United States and among the outstanding publishers of scholarly books in country. It holds membership in the Association of American University Presses, the largest organization of scholarly publishers in the world.

Over the decades, LSU Press has grown steadily and currently publishes approximately eighty new books each year as well as a backlist of some 1,000 titles. Noted internationally for its books, the Press’s primary areas of focus include southern history, biography, and literature; the American Civil War and World War II; poetry; political philosophy and political communications; music studies, particularly jazz; geography and environmental studies; and illustrated books about the Gulf South region. The Press is perhaps most widely recognized as the original publisher of John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces. In the mid-nineties it launched the acclaimed paperback fiction reprint series Voices of the South and, in 2005, after a hiatus of about a decade, resumed publishing original fiction under the new series Yellow Shoe Fiction, edited by Michael Griffith.

LSU Press is the only university press to have won a Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and poetry. Through the years, its books have earned many prestigious honors, including a total of four Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Man Booker Prize, the American Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, the Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets, and numerous others. Prizes are regularly bestowed on LSU Press authors for the excellence of their general body of work, from such notable institutions as the Folger Shakespeare Library, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Foundation, and the Cleveland Foundation. All books that the Press publishes must undergo a rigorous approval process that includes assessment by outside experts in the book’s field and a favorable recommendation by the University Press Committee.

As an academic unit of the University, LSU Press does receive some state funding.^[1] However, the Press is 90 percent self-supporting with revenue derived from book sales, subsidiary rights, licenses, grants, and contributions from private individuals.