WELCOME TO THE BRIDGE BOOKS HOMEPAGE a book publishing division of Bridge
LAUNCHED IN 2022, Bridge Books was founded with the belief that books are the vascular systems of democracy, delivering the intellectual oxygen required for a body politic to actively, inclusively, effectively self-govern and thrive. Bridge Books strives to provide that oxygen through publication of interventionist titles in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual art, architecture, dance, couture, cinema, and the broad spectrum other artistic disciplines and related interests as defined by the concerns of the Bridge collective of artists, including work by its members, as well as new, relevant and vital voices when encountered.
News of upcoming Bridge Books and StepSister Press titles, calls for submission and more will be made through our newsroom page. You can also subscribe to our newsletter for news and other Bridge-related announcements, including calls for submission.
Bridge is a proud member of the following alliances:
New & Upcoming
BRIDGE BOOKS: “Instructions for Living” by Michael Workman
Instructions for Living by Michael Workman
Instructions for Living is a collection of performance scores, civic prompts, and poetic directives that invite readers to reconsider how they move through space, language, memory, and one another. Blurring the boundaries between choreography, writing, sculpture, and social practice, the book offers a series of instructions-each designed to activate the body as both instrument and inquiry.
Across its pages, simple gestures unfold into complex propositions. Stand still and observe how architecture instructs you. Imagine a small circle at your feet and refuse to step outside it. Choose a single word; break it into sounds until breath reshapes your spine. Approach a sculptural element as if it has asked for help. These prompts operate as "choreographic objects" in textual form: frameworks that structure attention, alter posture, and reveal the invisible systems-civic, emotional, historical-that pattern our behavior.
Rooted in Michael Workman's decades-long interdisciplinary practice, Instructions for Living draws from performances, workshops, and exhibitions developed in collaboration with dancers, artists, and communities. The scores reflect an ongoing investigation into how bodies are shaped by architecture and urbanism, how movement encodes power, how grief and memory inhabit gesture, and how even the smallest shift-an inch, a pause, a reversal-can become choreographic microcosms.
Both intimate and collective, the book functions as a portable studio and a public tool. It can be read privately, enacted alone, or activated in groups. It asks participants not simply to perform, but to notice: the routes others carve through space, the ways presence can be rehearsed or undone, the difference between becoming data and becoming deviation.
At once poetic manual, civic meditation, and choreographic archive, Instructions for Living proposes that instruction is not control but invitation. The body is a sentence. The space is punctuation. Between them, a new language is always forming.
Imprints & Affiliates
Fwd: Museums Journal strives to create a space for challenging, critiquing, and fostering new futures for cultural production within and outside of museums.
Fwd: Museums Journal is produced and edited by students at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Its home is UIC's Museum and Exhibition Studies Program and it is published by Chicago-based StepSister Press.
Click the title for the Fwd: Museum Journal’s external homepage and the logo for StepSister Press.
Hurm Editions seeks to fill a void in the current international publishing landscape. In a culture increasingly sanitized by the infringements on art of corporate norms as community standards, that helps fosters a culture of mass shootings by refusing to depict the aftermaths of our national obsession with gun violence, and that claims to celebrate sexual identity while outlawing any depictions whatsoever of sex or eroticism, Hurm Editions seeks to support work that challenges convention, pushes boundaries, and that revels in the grotesque, incoherent, offensive and obscene.
StepSister Press, an independent publishing company founded by Annie Heckman in 2007 to promote conversation on emerging art, literature, educational, and critical theory projects, became an imprint of Bridge Books in 2022. The press has coordinated projects and collaborations with artists and writers around the world, including the annual Fwd: Museums series, in partnership with the Museum and Exhibition Studies (MUSE) Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).
Featured Backlist Titles
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Excavating History
Rebecca Keller started Excavating History with site-specific interventions in an anatomy theatre in Estonia in 2006. Her method has since become a course, a collective, and a series of exhibitions in historic sites in the United States and Europe. This book documents and expands on her pedagogical approaches, including numerous works from her student collaborators, and a section with advice for educators and potential excavators who want to pursue projects of their own.
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Fwd: Museums, Home (2020)
How do museums respond to the urgency of the moment?
In what ways can they be transformed to foster justice work? Fwd: Museums Journal, an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed publication, shares critical analysis, interventions, and dialogs focused on museums and other sites of cultural work. Our contributors reexamine, critique and challenge museums as socially responsive spaces.
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Perfect Worlds: Artistic Forms & Social Imaginaries, Vol. 1
Perfect Worlds: Artistic Forms & Social Imaginaries is a philosophical study of equality as binding principle by art-makers across disciplines, and how they view their work situated across unrestricted spectrums of social and ideological value. As source material for the tropes and themes of Workman’s interactionist and instructional choreographic work, they are intended as a recovery of under-represented discourses, scholarly research volumes, and critic’s “selected works.” It also aspires to trace the contours of what more life-like art may be present — or imagined — in today’s shifting social imaginaries.
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Fwd: Museums, Inaugurations (2016)
Museums, like all other social institutions, reflect the tensions and contradictions of their times. The Museum and Exhibition Studies (MUSE) Graduate Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago proposes that these museum problems are deeply seeded in the field and its professions. It’s likely that their remedies will require some equally deep — radical — change and reimagining. Responding to the urgencies of the moment and recognizing the need to transform museums and our cultural work within their spaces, MUSE offers this new journal. Fwd: Museums signals a desire to lift up and forward ideas that might push our collective thinking. This volume explores the theme of inaugurations, or firsts and beginnings, with over 20 contributions from scholars and creative practitioners.
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Sunshine Rose: What My Mother Taught Me about Aging, Alzheimer’s, and the End of Life
Camille Grafer describes the journey she and her mother took after Mama Rose was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Recalling the life of her mother — a widow raising her only child in Chicago in the 1950s — Camille tells the story of her own transitions as a caregiver. Her loving tribute is filled with strategies for how to face this illness with generosity and humor.
