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Stages: On dying, working, and feeling
by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff


Can care be enacted through art? Inside a cathedral, staff members from a nursing home work with an artist to perform a poetic text about caregiving, loss, and taking the time to feel one’s feelings. In the months leading up to the performance, the artist navigates her twenties—and art and life converge in unexpected ways. Weaving between oral history and poetic prose, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff has created a stirring work of hybrid nonfiction that takes us behind the scenes of artmaking and caregiving. Melding curiosity, humility, playfulness, and self-deprecation, Stages is an inquiry into the work it takes to sustain a meaningful life.

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4.75 by 7.5, 126 pages,
black and white photography, paperback
︎ USD $20 (free US shipping/$20 international)
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selfcarefully by
Gracy Obouchowicz


selcarefully is a book about care. Written by a group facilitator/self-care coach, selfcarefully consists of 30 vignettes intended to inspire readers to use self-care as a lens for various aspects of living. Vignettes include: self-care and setting boundaries, self-care and soaking grains, self-care and the moon, self-care and racism, self-care and consumerism, self-care and perfectionism, self-care and community, etc. The book also contains excerpts from three interviews about justice-seeking, leadership, and self-care in action.

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5.4 x 8.5, 84 pages
ills color, risograph-printed.
Design and illustration by Maria Habi
First printing ipsy bipsy studio; Second printing: Risolve Studio
︎ USD $20 (free US shipping/$20 international)
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Recuerdos de Nuestro Pasado
by Angela Celaya, Sergio Guzmán, Jose Lovos, Gloria Revelo, and Erin Segal


Recuerdos de Nuestro Pasado is a polyphonic memoir about growing up in El Salvador and growing old in Washington, DC. Part oral history, part artist’s book, Recuerdos emerged unexpectedly from a storytelling group at Mary’s Center’s Bernice Fonteneau Senior Wellness Center. Using alternating English-language stanzas, the book expresses the life stories of four senior citizens. Recuerdos includes images of the seniors’ photographs and objects, as well as illustrations by the book designer. Eight narrow pages contain content referencing the collaborative practices that engendered this unusual book-as-object. (The authors have decided to donate all profit, if any, to St. Jude Children's Hospital.

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6.5 x 10.25 inches, 112 pages,ills color, hardcover
︎ USD $27 
(free US shipping/$20 international)
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books, emerging is a series of limited edition booklets, sold at printing cost.  Often, but not always, the booklets consist of multiple texts, interviews, or lectures related to our primary areas of focus: care and care work.  We produce books, emerging with an eye towards splashier, heftier projects in the future—perhaps by Thick Press, perhaps by others who encounter these booklet-objects.

Together at the Edge of the World: On Healing Justice


Healing justice is an ancestral technology—one part imagination, one part pragmatism, one part memory, and one part future, with dashes of belief in our inherent dignity. It is how we have learned to be, how we have learned to hold ourselves at the edge of the world. (And on the other side of that edge—again and again and again.) When the machinery of oppression tries to consume us, healing justice redirects us to shared survival, resistance, joy, and soulfulness, as well as to the other sultry stuff of wellbeing. We ask, “How do we resource one another?” and Together at the Edge of the World: On Healing Justice answers by offering wisdom from healers, organizers, and poets. It includes generational whispers from Saida Agostini, word alchemy from Elizabeth Saint-Victor, a powerful transmission from Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, and interludes from your curator, Richael Faithful. Adorned with Kassamira Carter-Howard’s assemblage, this time capsule leaves behind what we know, what we are asking, and what we create, in service to our collective wellbeing.

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Available for pre-order
4.4 x 7 inches
Black and white, color (photocopier and risograph)
Edition of 80
︎ USD $8 ($3 US shipping/$10 international)
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**SOLD OUT**

Beyond Critique:
Composition and Curiosity in Therapy


Chris Hoff and Justine D'Arrigo are family therapy practitioners and scholars who often collaborate on academic projects that trouble mainstream psychotherapy ideas and practices. In particular, they are exploring how critically- and politically- oriented therapists, counselors, and social workers might maintain the link to the small, rather than being pushed further into structuralist definitions of problems and people. In this book, emerging, Justine & Chris expand and reinvigorate curiosity by spotlighting the work of Bruno Latour and Ana Louise Keating, who draws on foundational concepts from Gloria Anzaldúa. Their emerging work serves as a pathway between beyond deconstruction, reduction, and the potential limitations of identity politics—towards what they are calling a compositionist therapy.

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4.4 x 7 inches
2nd edition black and white, color
Edition of 50
︎ USD $5 ($3 US shipping/$10 international)
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Tree Codex: Mural-making as a cultural collective


In 2019, Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School, a DC-based organization that offers adult education and services to recently migrated DC-residents, commissioned Frida Larios, an indigenous activist, designer, artist, and educator, to lead a small group of students in designing and painting a mural. Larios employed her system of ancestral hieroglyphics redesigned as a contemporary visual language for genetic memory regeneration. A collaborative process of talking, imagining, writing, and drawing the students' cultural stories culminated in Tree Codex. This book, emerging documents that process.

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4.4 x 7 inches
2nd edition black and white, color
Edition of 50
︎ USD $8 ($3 US shipping/$10 international)
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**SOLD OUT**

A Knock on the Door: Dialogues on Aging, Dying, and Working


On November 1, 2018, a group of staff members from the Hebrew Home at Riverdale performed a poetic text assembled by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, with composition by Coleman Zurkowski and movement by Rachel Bernsen. The performance asks: What happens when death and dying is part of your workplace? How does it change you to be part of the process of dying? How can the philosophies of end of life caregivers affect how we live?

In addition to giving physical form to these philosophies, this booklet represents a segment of Stages: On dying, working, and feeling about dying and caring, authored by Kauder Nalebuff. That originally formatted book was published in 2020 by Thick Press.

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4.4 x 7 inches
2nd edition black and white on color paper
Edition of 50
︎ USD $6 ($3 US shipping/$10 international)
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printout gives physical form to digital content created by us, often in collaboration with others.

On care, vulnerability, and publishing practice


The transcript of a presentation by Julie Cho and Erin Segal on December 4, 2019 at the Women's Center for Creative Work, organized by the Southland Institute (for critical, durational, and typographic post-studio practices). Free PDF available at The Southland Institute.

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8.5 x 11 inches
blue and white, risograph printed
Printed by ipsy bipsy studio
︎ USD $1 ($3 US shipping/$20 international)
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Learning from End of Life Care Workers Now and After COVID-19: Insisting on Structures for Grief and Time


A conversation between Erin Segal, publisher at Thick Press, and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, author of Stages: On dying, working, and feeling. Full text available on dirtdmv.com.

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8.5 x 11 inches
orchid and white, risograph printed
Printed by ipsy bipsy studio
︎ USD $1 ($3 US shipping/$20 international)
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**SOLD OUT**
What does a project about death, care work, and feelings have to do with the Green New Deal?


A conversation between Erin Segal, publisher at Thick Press, and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, author of Stages: On dying, working, and feeling. Full text available on Medium.

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8.5 x 11 inches
blue and white, risograph printed
Printed by ipsy bipsy studio
︎ USD $1 ($3 US shipping/$20 international)
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Our No Waste Nature and Craft Group


In 2020, the No Waste Nature and Craft Group at the Bernice Fonteneau Senior Wellness Center in Washington DC collaborated with Thick Press to make a digital book about their wellness group, which centers around nature and upcycling. Combining visual elements with transcribed conversation, Our No Waste Nature and Craft Group celebrates community, creativity, and engagement with the natural world. The book is available for download from Loam Magazine.

In early 2021, the group members who have continued to meet over Zoom since the start of the pandemic wanted to create a print version of the digital book as a keepsake for themselves and those who haven’t been able to access the digital book. On the occasion of the Printed Matter Art Book Fair, we are making available a few extra copies—along with a zine called “Mental Health is About Feeling Your Feelings,” created by the group members.

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10 x 6.3 inches
ills color on newsprint
︎ USD $10 ($3 US shipping/$20 international)
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A bouquet of books! Stages, Is God Is, and The People’s Republic of  Valerie


A bouquet of books from three small presses to make you cry, speak language aloud, remember why you love theater, are disillusioned with the theater, want more from theater. Or all of it at once!

1.  STAGES: ON WORKING, DYING, AND FEELING
Thick Press, 2020
By Rachel Kauder Nalebuff

2. IS GOD IS
3 Hole Press, 2017
By Aleshea Harris
Introduction by Dawn Lundy Martin.

Blending epic tragedy, the Spaghetti Western, hip-hop and Afropunk, Is God Is is a revenge tale about twin sisters. In this award-winning work by playwright Aleshea Harris, emotions are laid bare through dialogue and visual gaps in language.Winner of the 2016 Relentless Award from the American Playwriting Foundation. Winner of a 2018 Obie Award for Playwriting.

3. THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF VALERIE, LIVING ROOM EDITION
53rd State Press, 2019
by Kristen Kosmas
with cartography by Leon Finley
and an introduction by Daniel Alexander Jone.

Part boot-camp space-travel memoir, part how-to manual for the construction of a real utopia now, The People’s Republic of Valerie, Living Room Edition is an attempt to transform feelings of despair, grief, and rage into positive action, into something of beauty that might create space and occasion for imagination and community.

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︎ USD $33 ($3 US shipping/$20 international)
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