26 Black-Owned Publishers (8 Accept Submissions)

I always had a huge respect for Black authors and artists. To me, it all started with the hip-hop culture in the 90s, and then getting familiar with towering literary figures such as James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison.

So this page is sorted by what a writer can do with each one. Eight independent houses take work directly from writers. Two more are wide open to unagented authors but are units of their universities, not Black-owned companies. Four are alive and not reading anything. Five sell publishing packages to authors instead of buying books from them. Six publish no route for a writer at all, including one that says in its own FAQ that it is not a publisher. If you want the wider view afterwards, browse the full catalog of publishing companies, or the UK-based publishers for the London end of this list.

Reading windows and submission platforms change without notice, so check the publisher’s own page before you send anything. Last verified: August 1, 2026.

Black-Owned Publishers Accepting Submissions

These eight independent houses say on their own sites that a writer may approach them directly, without a literary agent.

1. Third World Press Foundation

Third World Press Foundation accepts proposals, and it is the heavyweight here: Haki R. Madhubuti’s Chicago press, publishing the Black experience for more than fifty years by its own count. Its author guidelines page puts it plainly: “TWP welcomes the submission of book proposals for the fields in which we publish.”

What it wants in a proposal is unusually specific, and worth reading before you write anything: an abstract or description of the manuscript, a statement of how the book will distinguish itself from the competition, an annotated table of contents with brief chapter summaries, an estimated length in words including notes and bibliography, the number and type of illustrations, and the date by which you expect the manuscript to be finished. Proposals go by post to 7822 S. Dobson Avenue, Chicago IL 60619, with “Book Proposals” as the subject line.

Use the author-guidelines link above. The /submit-a-manuscript-2/ address that circulates elsewhere is a 404, and so are the obvious guesses at a replacement.

2. Just Us Books

Just Us Books accepts queries, and its guidelines are the most welcoming here. Wade and Cheryl Hudson’s East Orange, New Jersey house calls itself the nation’s leading independent publisher of Black-interest children’s literature, and its guidelines page names exactly what it is reading: picture books, chapter books for ages 7 to 9, and middle reader titles for ages 9 to 12, fiction and nonfiction, with the imprint Marimba Books covering multicultural children’s books.

The sentence that matters most to a new writer is this one: “We welcome queries from both agented and unagented authors.” Send a query letter pitching the manuscript with your email address and any publishing credits, a synopsis, and three to five sample pages, by post to Submissions Dept., P.O. Box 5306, East Orange, NJ 07019, or by email to submissions@justusbooks.com.

3. Black Classic Press

W. Paul Coates founded Black Classic Press in Baltimore in 1978 to bring obscure and out-of-print books by Black writers back into circulation, and its catalogue reads like a syllabus: Marcus Garvey, John Henrik Clarke, Carter G. Woodson, J.A. Rogers, Walter Mosley, Amiri Baraka. It also runs its own printing operation.

The door is open and it is narrow. Black Classic Press is only accepting manuscripts that the author is already using in a college or university classroom. If that describes your book, send a synopsis, table of contents, first chapter, your strongest chapter, and the name of your institution, department and address along with your typical class size and how often you teach it, to natalie@blackclassicbooks.com. Hard copies are not returned without a stamped, self-addressed envelope. If you are teaching from your own manuscript in Maryland or anywhere else, this is a real route; otherwise it is not one.

4. 2Leaf Press

2Leaf Press is accepting submissions, in its own words, followed immediately by a warning that a reply can take two to three months. Gabrielle David’s press is explicit about wanting multicultural authors, and publishes poetry, memoir, essays and nonfiction across its 2LP Series.

Email only, and read the format rules before you send: put a bio with your full name, postal address and previous publishing experience, a summary of the manuscript with its word count, and a sample chapter in the body of the email. Anything sent with an attachment is deleted automatically, and anything sent by post is discarded. It does not publish young adult, board books, early readers, cookbooks, romance or self-help, so check the 2LP Series requirements first to see whether your book has a home there.

5. Afrocentric Books

Afrocentric Books accepts submissions of novels, and it is the most transparent entry here about what happens after you sign. Its own footer identifies it as an imprint of Mugwump Press LLC, and its list runs to speculative fiction, fantasy, horror, poetry and urban fiction, including urban science fiction and fantasy.

For a novel: a bio of up to 500 words, a 500-word synopsis and the first two chapters, all pasted into the body of an email to submissions@afrocentricbooks.com. Attachments you were not asked for are deleted immediately, postal submissions are refused outright, and the response window is six weeks. The terms are published on the same page instead of held back for a contract: 50% of net sales, rising to 65% once a book passes $4,000 in net sales, on a seven-year exclusive. Short stories are read only during anthology windows, and the AfroMyth Volume 2 window is past, so a shorter piece means waiting for the next call. If short work is what you have, the collection of short stories by African-American authors is a better place to start reading.

6. Cassava Republic

Cassava Republic Press accepts submissions, but only inside a window, and the windows are the whole story. The Abuja and London house, whose imprints are Ankara Press and Cassava Children’s Books, runs a rotating calendar instead of a standing inbox, and its submissions page is kept current with the dates.

The rotation as published: literary fiction closing 30 June, children’s fiction and non-fiction opening 1 September and closing at the end of that month, adult non-fiction opening 1 November and closing 30 November, plus a commercial fiction and non-fiction slot covering romance, thriller and fantasy. Everything goes through its Submittable page, linked from the submissions page above instead of reproduced here, because platform addresses are the part of any publisher’s setup that rots fastest. It also runs a manuscript prize, which is worth checking against the calendar before you send anything cold. Save the submissions page and come back to it, because outside a window nothing you send is read.

7. Urban Books

Urban Books accepts submissions of completed manuscripts, and the word completed is doing real work there. Carl Weber’s house, with its Urban Renaissance line, is one of the busiest publishers of urban and African American fiction in the United States, and its catalogue is still filling out month by month with new titles dated June 2026.

To submit to either Urban Books or Urban Renaissance, email submissions@urbanbooks.net with the first three completed chapters and a six-to-ten sentence summary of the novel. A response takes four to six weeks where one comes at all, and the site says outright that the volume is too high to reply to everyone.

8. Cole Hart Signature

Cole Hart Signature accepts submissions through an upload form, and the form is the only part of the site that tells you anything concrete. The Atlanta house publishes African American urban fiction, romance, mafia and crime, suspense and Christian fiction, and the route is a single page: your name, your email, a description of the story and the manuscript file itself, up to 450 MB.

Two things to know before you use it. The /submissions address is a 404, so use the page linked above. And the site’s own “Publish your novel” page, which reads like the place the guidelines would be, is marketing copy with no instructions on it at all. No fee appears anywhere on the site, but with no published contract terms either, ask for them in writing before you sign.

Two University Presses That Are Not Black-Owned

Both entries below are units of their universities, not independent Black-owned companies. They are here because both publish serious African American studies lists and both take proposals from unagented authors, so go in knowing what they are.

9. University of Georgia Press

The University of Georgia Press accepts proposals by email, and it is the scholarly publisher here with the strongest civil rights and Southern history list. It is the book publishing arm of the University of Georgia in Athens, with the imprints NewSouth Books, Milestone Press and Georgia Review Books.

A proposal wants an overview, an annotated table of contents with a one- to two-paragraph description of each chapter, two sample chapters, the proposed format, any illustrations or charts, an estimated length between 40,000 and 100,000 words, a schedule for the finished draft, a preliminary bibliography and your CV. Read the acquisitions team’s areas of interest first and write to the right editor. Two limits are firm: unsolicited fiction and poetry are ruled out except through its competitions, namely the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Georgia Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Series and the Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction; and unsolicited children’s queries are ruled out entirely. Everything goes by email, and telephone inquiries are not returned.

10. Wayne State University Press

Wayne State University Press accepts proposals, and it is the Detroit institution of the two. It publishes on the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan, the Great Lakes and the Midwest, and says it particularly invites projects in those areas that engage race and culture, Indigeneity, gender and sexuality, language and literature, and ecology and the environment. Active series include Made in Michigan Writers, Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media, and TV Milestones.

Send your materials as PDFs or Word documents to wsupsubmissions@wayne.edu, and review the editors’ areas of interest before you do, because the press asks you to say why your project belongs on its list and who will buy it.

Active Presses That Are Not Reading Submissions

All four are trading and publishing. None of them will read a manuscript you send today.

11. RedBone Press

RedBone Press is not accepting submissions. That is the entire text of its writers’ guidelines, and it has been the answer for some time. Lisa C. Moore’s press has published Black lesbian and gay writing for decades, poetry and essays and anthologies that shaped a whole shelf, and it is still very much alive, now self-distributing its own books after Small Press Distribution’s closure left hundreds of small presses to sort out their own logistics.

Worth watching, not writing to. A press this small reopens when it has the capacity, not on a schedule.

12. Broadside Lotus Press

Broadside Lotus Press does not accept manuscripts at present: “Any materials sent during the closed period will not be reviewed.” This is the Detroit press that carries two of the most important names in Black poetry publishing: Dudley Randall, who founded Broadside in 1965 after self-publishing “The Ballad of Birmingham,” and Naomi Long Madgett, Poet Laureate of Detroit from 2001 to 2020, whose legacy the press says it continues.

There is one live route, and it is a competition and not an inbox: the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, for poets of African descent, with a deadline of 15 March, a manuscript length of 60 to 90 pages and, unusually for a poetry prize, no reading fee. The 2025 winner was Dr. Joanne Godley’s “How the Black Panthers Fell from the Sky,” a memoir in verse about her teenage years in the Black Panther Party.

A note on the address. The www. host of broadsidelotuspress.org fails its TLS handshake outright, so any link carrying the www prefix errors in every browser. The press rebuilt its site on the bare domain, which works fine.

13. Lee & Low

Lee & Low Books is closed to unsolicited manuscript submissions until further notice, in its own words, and the reason it gives is an extensive backlog and not a change of direction. It is the largest multicultural children’s book publisher in the United States, with imprints including Bebop Books, Children’s Book Press, Shen’s Books, Tu Books, Cinco Puntos Press and Más.

Two doors are still ajar. Agented work is still read, as are projects from writers’ conferences its editors attended. And if you have never been published, the New Voices Award and the New Visions Award are contests built precisely for unpublished writers of color and Native and Indigenous writers, and those are the routes the press points people to. Illustrators are treated differently again: send a link to your portfolio site and an editor will make contact if there is a fit, but a manuscript sent to that address is not considered.

One address to watch: /writers-illustrators/writing-guidelines now redirects to a general author-resources page instead of the policy, which is how a closed door can look open for years.

14. Jacaranda Books

Jacaranda Books does not accept unsolicited submissions, and its contact page says so by pointing writers somewhere else entirely: “For writers seeking information on how to be published, we suggest the Writers and Artists Yearbook.” There is no submissions page in the navigation, and /pages/submissions is a 404.

That is a shame and not a scandal, because Valerie Brandes’ London house is one of the most interesting independents in Britain. It was named Small Press of the Year at the 2020 British Book Awards for #TwentyIn2020, an initiative to publish twenty titles by twenty Black British writers in a single year, and it co-launched the #InclusiveIndies campaign that raised over £100,000 for twelve other small presses during the pandemic. It has been distributed by Hachette UK since 2021 and publishes Irenosen Okojie, Bernice L. McFadden and Shola von Reinhold. Editorial contacts are published by name on that page, which is the right way in if you have something other than a cold manuscript.

Pay-To-Publish Services, Not Publishers

The distinction that matters: a publisher pays you, and a service charges you. All five below charge. None of them hides it, and the prices and packages are on their own sites, but none of them belongs on a list of companies accepting submissions, because you are not submitting to them. You are buying from them.

15. BlackGold Publishing

What BlackGold publishes in place of submission guidelines is a price list. Tahara Saron founded BlackGold in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia in 2017, and its paperback production packages run from $375 for “Welcome Author” (up to 50 pages, 5×8, matte cover, black and white interior, editing and distribution and cover design all sold separately), through $755 for “Indie Author” (up to 200 pages, with retailer distribution and cover design included), to $955 for “Seasoned Author” (up to 350 pages, colour interior, editing and ebook included), plus an a la carte option.

The same page also tells you how long ago it was last touched. It still carries the line “Submissions are now closed for August 2020 – January 2021” and a COVID-19 shipping-delay banner, so nothing on the site establishes what the company is doing now.

16. True Vine Publishing

Same shape, no ambiguity at all: its author page is titled “Packages,” and it offers Basic Book Production, Professional Publishing, Legacy Author and Bestseller tiers, with a shopping cart, a checkout and a “Schedule a Consultation” button. The Tennessee company describes the Basic package as being for authors who want a professionally made physical book “without the complexities of marketing and distribution,” which is an accurate description of a printing and production service.

Nothing here is hidden and nothing here is an acquisitions route. If you want this kind of help, compare the tiers against what the same money buys elsewhere before you commit.

17. Williams and King Publishers

The homepage headline is “IT’S TIME TO PUBLISH YOUR BOOK! We offer a range of packages and services to fit your budget and needs,” and the navigation lists Silver, Gold and Diamond packages alongside promotions and testimonials. What passes for submission guidelines is a contact form with a captcha.

Its author resources section includes a guide to promoting your book on a budget, which is a fair thing for a service to publish. It is still a service.

18. Strive Publishing

Strive names its own model without being asked: “Strive Publishing is a hybrid press,” built around self-publishing services and co-created projects. Mary Taris founded it in Minneapolis to solve two problems she names on the site, the shortage of culturally relevant children’s books and the under-representation of Black authors in publishing, and it runs a bricks-and-mortar bookstore at 825 Nicollet Mall downtown alongside the press. Its picture book “Our First Bus Ride,” tied to the film “Separate Not Equal: Minnesota’s Integration Story,” sold out twice.

One address note: the company now trades from strivepubandco.com, and strivepublishing.com redirects there. The /publish-a-book-overview path is a 404 on the new domain. Strive also puts out an open call to Black illustrators, editors, graphic designers and book designers who want to work on its projects, which is the most useful thing here for anyone who is not a writer.

19. J&B Press

Jessica Jackson Tingling founded J&B Press in Philadelphia in early 2019 after years of designing publications informally, and the business is Black-owned and woman-owned. What it sells is production: layout and graphic design, book cover design, copyright, ISBN, ISSN and barcode filings, content development, editing and revisions, and printer selection, for books, catalogues, magazines, pamphlets and brochures. The call to action on every page is “Contact J&B Press LLC Today For A Custom Quote and To Discuss Your Publication.”

A quote is not an acquisition, which is why it sits in this section and not the first. Useful if you are an artist or a small organisation with a publication to make, less so if you are a novelist looking for a home. One oddity: jandbpressphilly.com is a two-line frameset that loads the company’s Weebly site, so the address works but is not where the site actually lives.

Listed Here, But With No Route For Writers

Six real, active organisations that publish nothing a writer can act on. In each case the address that circulates as their submissions page is a contact form, a store page or a route for something other than a manuscript.

20. Africa World Press & The Red Sea Press

Established in 1983 and still working from 541 West Ingham Avenue in Trenton, New Jersey, Africa World Press has spent four decades publishing the history, culture and politics of Africa and its diaspora, including “Funu: The Unfinished Saga of East Timor” by José Ramos-Horta, who went on to share the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize. The Red Sea Press followed two years later, co-publishing and distributing other houses’ work, which is why its store also carries Black Classic Press, Third World Press, Lushena, A&B, Karnak House and Orbis titles.

What it publishes nowhere on that site is a submissions page. There is none at /submissions, /submissions/, /manuscript-submissions/ or /pages/submissions, none in the navigation, and the address usually labelled “Submission guidelines” is the store’s customer-service contact page. So this entry makes no claim either way about what the press reads, because the site does not tell you. Its published contact route is customerservice@africaworldpressbooks.com or (609) 695-3200, and African content of the kind it publishes is worth reading before you write to anyone there.

21. African American Images

Dr. Jawanza Kunjufu’s house, now working out of Gilbert, Arizona, and with a long shelf of books on educating Black children: “Understanding Black Male Learning Styles,” “Keeping Black Boys Out of Special Education,” “There Is Nothing Wrong With Black Students,” “Educating Black Girls.” The store, the blog and the catalogue are all live.

Its own sitemap lists six things: home, bookstore, blog, a page about Jawanza Kunjufu, a privacy notice and a contact form. That is the whole site. There is no submissions page, /submissions, /submit/, /publish/ and /authors/ all return a 404, and the address that circulates as its submissions page is the contact form. Its published address for anything else is customersvc@africanamericanimages.com.

22. Amber Books Publishing

Tony Rose’s Amber Communications Group in Phoenix, Arizona, publishing self-help and music biographies through the Amber Books and Colossus Books imprints. By his own account Rose won an NAACP Image Award in 2013 for “Obama Talks Back,” held a multi-year co-publishing deal with John Wiley & Sons, and was named African American Book Publisher of the Year at the 2014 Leimert Park Book Fair, so this is a long track record and not a shell.

It publishes no manuscript route on its site. /submissions/, /submit/ and /authors/ are 404s, and the address that circulates is a contact form giving direct phone numbers and email for Tony Rose and for Yvonne Rose. Yvonne Rose runs Quality Press, which is a separate thing worth understanding before you call: it is a paid book-packaging service for self-publishers, not an imprint that buys manuscripts. If you write to Amber, be clear which of the two you are asking about.

23. New Beacon Books

Britain’s first Black publishing house and specialist bookshop, founded by John La Rose in 1966 and marking its sixtieth anniversary in 2026, at 76 Stroud Green Road in north London. It is a genuine institution, tied to the George Padmore Institute, and it still trades. The shop is open Thursday to Saturday, midday to six.

Its “Getting Your Book Stocked” page is not a manuscript route, and reading it closely is the fastest way to see why. “Getting Your Book Stocked” asks bookseller questions: your RRP and trade pricing, paperback or hardback, what marketing you have already done, and it asks you to send a proposal with a non-returnable review copy of a book you have already published. That is a request to get finished books onto a shop’s shelves, not a route to being published. Its own navigation still labels the page “Closed reopens April 2019,” which tells you how long that link has been misdescribed. New Beacon does publish under the NB Publications name, but no route for manuscripts appears anywhere on the site.

24. Johnson Publishing Company

John H. Johnson started this company in 1942 with a $500 loan secured against his mother’s furniture, launched Ebony in 1945 and Jet in 1951, and built the largest Black-owned public company in the United States. It belongs in any history of Black publishing, and the reason it does not belong on a list of places to send a manuscript is on its own history page.

Johnson Publishing filed for liquidation in 2019 to allow the brand to be reinvented, and under Linda Johnson Rice it re-emerged in 2021 as a multimedia and production company making television and film. Its site has four pages, history, about, projects and contact, and the projects are a docu-series adapted from a book property it retains and the John H. Johnson Museum and Education Center. There is no book programme and no writer’s route on it; the one address published is info@johnsonpublishing.com.

25. African Books Collective

African Books Collective does not accept submissions from authors, and it answers the question itself in its FAQ, in a single line worth quoting in full: “Is ABC a publisher? No, ABC is not a publisher. If you are an author we are happy to suggest African publishers who might be interested in hearing from you, but have no influence over their publishing decisions.”

What it actually is turns out to be more interesting. Based in Oxford and owned and governed by African publishers themselves, its Council of Management is drawn from Sub-Saharan Publishers in Ghana, Malthouse Press in Nigeria, Langaa in Cameroon, African Minds in South Africa, East African Educational Publishers in Kenya, Mkuki na Nyota in Tanzania and Editora Trinta Zero Nove in Mozambique, among others. It markets and distributes their titles worldwide, feeds their metadata to the wholesalers and discovery services that decide whether a book can be found at all, and runs the African Journals Initiative. If you are an African publisher and not an author, its new-applicants route is the relevant one. If you are a writer, it will point you at its member publishers and nothing more.

One Name To Approach With Care

Cedar Grove Publishing is a real and well-regarded small press. It published “Sycorax’s Daughters,” an anthology of horror by African American women that was a 2018 Bram Stoker Award finalist, along with “Black Kirby” and the “4 Pages 16 Bars” series, and it is still carried on the publisher list of the Independent Publishers Group and in the membership of the Independent Publishers Caucus. Its catalogue thins out after 2018.

The problem is the address. The domain the press is usually listed under no longer serves it: every path answers with a bot-check screen instead of a page, two separate attempts to read it through a different service failed outright, and the only content search engines have indexed against that domain is Russian-language online-casino copy under a different name. No current first-party site for the press could be found, so its trading status and any submissions route are both unverifiable. Do not send work to the address you find in a search result.

Wrap Up

Eight independent Black-owned houses take work directly from writers, and Just Us Books and 2Leaf Press are the most welcoming of them if you have no agent. Third World Press Foundation is the one with the most weight behind it. Cassava Republic is the one to diarise instead of emailing today, because it reads only inside a window.

Read each publisher’s own guidelines before you send anything. A submissions link that loads is not the same as a submissions link that works: plenty of them answer with a healthy 200 and land on a contact form, a shop’s stock request, a marketing page or a price list. Reading windows, submission platforms and package pages all change without warning, so check the source.

If you want to widen the net, the catalog of publishing companies is the place to start, nonprofit book publishers covers presses run on grants and donations instead of sales, and short stories written by African-American authors is worth reading for its own sake before you write anything at all.