Publishing books that expose state violence, demand moral reckoning, and amplify silenced voices.

There is a particular kind of silence that surrounds executions in America. It is not the silence of ignorance — most people know, in some abstract way, that the death penalty exists, that the state kills people in their name. It is the silence of distance, of carefully maintained comfort, of a system designed to make sure that what happens behind prison walls stays there.

Complicit Press exists to break that silence. Our name is not an accident. To stay quiet about state violence is to be party to it. Publishing is how we refuse.

We are the nonprofit publishing imprint of the Execution Intervention Project (EIP), an organization built around the belief that every person facing execution deserves to be seen, fought for, and heard.

EIP works at the intersection of legal advocacy, direct intervention, and public education. Complicit Press is its literary arm — the place where the stories that don't fit into briefs or clemency petitions find their form. Books. Long, careful, unsparing books that ask readers to sit with what this country does, and why, and what it costs.

What distinguishes Complicit Press from a conventional publisher is not only what we publish but how we exist. We are a nonprofit operation, which means our decisions are not made by market logic. We do not ask whether a book will sell to the widest possible audience. We ask whether a book needs to exist — whether it carries testimony that would otherwise go unrecorded, whether it illuminates a corner of this system that has been allowed to stay dark.

Every dollar generated from our book sales goes directly back into EIP's work: supporting people on death row, funding legal interventions, pushing for clemency, and building the infrastructure of abolition. When you buy a book from Complicit Press, you are not a consumer. You are a participant.

The death penalty in America is sustained, in no small part, by the story society tells itself about it: that it is reserved for the worst of the worst, that it is applied fairly, that it is a last resort arrived at through careful and impartial deliberation. Literature has the power to put pressure on that story — to complicate it, to contradict it, to replace it with something closer to the truth.

We publish books that bear witness. We publish books that demand something of readers. We publish because the alternative — silence — is a choice we are not willing to make.