Common Notions is a press that describes itself as “deeply committed to publishing books that provide timely reflections, clear critiques, and inspiring strategies that amplify movements for social justice”. They emphasize that their publishing program “reflects the lessons we’ve learned as members of worker collectives, labor and tenants rights campaigns, higher ed struggles, #blacklivesmatter, no border and New Sanctuary movements, anticapitalist arts organizations, antiwar actions, climate justice camps, and the Palestinian solidarity movement.”

They are based in the Interference Archive in Brooklyn, NY; and at Making Worlds Bookstore and Social Center in Philadelphia. In the US their distributor is Consortium Books (A division of Ingram). To see the full list of their international distribution, please go here.

It is easy to get a feel for what they publish by going to their main page here. Their shop page is not organized around release date, but is still helpful. Their covers are well-designed and genre-appropriate.

They are open to proposals for that “showcase the horizons of collective liberation and have the power to create new possibilities for freedom in the present conjuncture. We value writing steeped in shared insight and experience, that embodies a spirit of mutualism and collaboration, and blends storytelling, organizing, and world-making in new, vivid configurations. We work with authors who build narrative self-determination and offer groundbreaking tools and resources for our struggles”.

They stress that they are interested in working with writers across a spectrum of movements and literary styles including the following:

• speculative fiction, fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry that explores the historical and ongoing legacies of anticolonial politics, the evolving nature of imperialism, and the world-making freedom movements of our times, writing that highlights vital and creative sources of internationalist imagination within the fractures and fault lines of the current world order.
• border abolition, sanctuary, migrant solidarity, refugee and diasporic narratives of internationalist organizing for a world without borders, walls, or cages
• land back, climate justice, Indigenous governance, frontline accounts of water and land defense
• queer, trans, and feminist rebellion and organizing
• anticolonial internationalism, solidarity and self-determination, futures of the nonaligned
• antifascist futures that centers anti-imperialist movements of Black, Indigenous, and Third World peoples
• intersections of abolition, anti-state autonomy, a politics in common, and of the commons
• collective care and health autonomy, science and social movements
• worker militancy, worker inquiry, worker autonomy and refusal, debt & wage abolition
• journalism and media activism from non-western movements, movement histories and contemporary accounts of decolonization from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Arab world
• cultural resistance, art, and graphic liberation

Submissions should align with their values and focus. Please do not submit to them if you think your work is not a good fit.

If you do think your work is a good fit, proposals must be sent via email. It will be seen by their editors and marketing team. They want “a clear and detailed idea of what your book will be about, what impact it will make, and with whom”. They also want to know “why you are writing this particular book at this particular time and how it advances the development of ideas and practice, as well as makes an intervention that is timely, necessary, and visionary.”

To learn more, and to read their full submission guidelines, go here.