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.
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Allen Poetry Imprint
Allen is Bridge Books’ poetry imprint, dedicated to poetry, poetics, and experimental literary work that extends Bridge’s long-standing commitment to artist-centered publishing. The imprint supports books and related projects that treat language as a site of research, encounter, and archived cultural memory.
Terpsichore Press
Terpsichore Press is Bridge Books’ imprint for advanced research in dance, performance, and movement-based art practices. An extension of our Movement Matters initiative, the imprint supports publications that document, theorize, and extend performance work through writing, scores, archives, artist books, and experimental publishing forms.
Bridge Books
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.
New Release
“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.
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
StepSister Press
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).
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.
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.