EMPIRE STATE EDITIONS
New York, New York *(the city so nice they named it twice)
Empire State Editions appeals to a diverse audience from local New Yorkers to those interested in our vibrant city from anywhere in the world.
The Bronx is up, but the Battery's down
The people ride in a hole in the groun'
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town!

Books in the Empire State Editions highlight the beauty, culture, diversity, and history of New York and the never-ending thirst for information about this global metropolis such as:
Boss of Black Brooklyn
America's Last Great Newspaper War
Eunice Hunton Carter
The Kingdom Began in Puerto Rico
Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan's Upper West Side
NEW THIS SPRING
An honest and gripping memoir of one man’s life-altering experience teaching at Rikers Island.
“Notorious enough to be nicknamed Torture Island, Rikers Island, home to one of the world’s largest correctional and mental institutions, has been the subject of our culture’s collective fascination for decades. I guarantee after you read Brandon Dean Lamson’s memoir Caged: A Teacher’s Journey Through Rikers, or How I Beheaded the Minotaur, you will never see that facility, nor prison education, kink, mindfulness, Richard Wright, or shame in quite the same way. On Rikers, as Lamson writes, ‘There were multiple literacies, various grids laid over the prisoners’ words and their worlds.’ This book guides us through those hybrid, polylingual, even nonverbal languages with an ethnographer’s eye and the rawness of reportage—from gang slang to institutional speech and literary allusion—always implicating the narrator in the narration, so that we are made complicit in the realization that prison education itself is a form of control and how solitary confinement is a kind of panopticon in reverse. As the men around him wrestle demons, Lamson stares down his own minotaur by confronting the violence in his own past with an unflinching poet’s heart that transforms trauma into beauty and fear into forgiveness. Caged is a potent lyrical reminder of the daily work that remains for each of us to do.”
—DR. RAVI SHANKAR, PUSHCART PRIZE–WINNING AUTHOR OF CORRECTIONAL
Praise for Empire State Editions
“In 'Walking New York', essayist Stephen Miller takes a look at the city's literary perambulators, examining the writing of Stephen Crane, Alfred Kazin and Teju Cole, among others, and offering an evolving portrait of New York through the centuries. 'Each Writer' Mr. Miller says in the book's preface, 'wanders a different city'.”
—The New York Observer
In the News
MURDER, INC. AND THE MORAL LIFE
“….history is not merely something to be read…and it does not merely refer to the past…On the contrary, history is literally present in all we do…”—James Baldwin History can be and often is a sobering reflection of the past, but also an equally important and welcomed window into the present …
Dorothy Day: Woman and Mother
The story of Dorothy Day is a familiar one to Catholics. Dorothy Day is one of the most well-known Catholic Icons in America. Her work with the poor remains a model and standard for charity work, and in 2000 she was given the title Servant of God by the Catholic …
University Press Week 2016: Celebrate Community!
Before the Fires—A True Community Product By Professor Mark Naison The response of people in the Bronx and neighboring communities to Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life in the Bronx from the 1930’s to the 1960’s (Fordham University Press) has been one of the most gratifying …
Pamela Lewis discusses black empowerment in the classroom
“Instilling black pride is not a threat. It is a necessity.” In an interview with The Huffington Post, author and educator Pamela Lewis discusses the imperative of black empowerment in America’s urban schools. Pamela Lewis isn’t like most of her fellow teachers. Lewis is black. She’s from the North Bronx …
Dorothy Day's New Step Towards Canonization
On April 19th, the Archdiocese of New York released a press release regarding an update in Dorothy Day’s progress towards possible sainthood. The Catholic Worker founder, who was named a “Servant of God” back in 2000 when the Vatican opened up the canonization process, is now under consideration to be elevated from “Servant of God” to “Venerable.”