History

North Atlantic Books is a nonprofit publisher committed to healing and the bold exploration of the relationships among mind, body, spirit, culture, and nature. Founded in Vermont in 1974 by Richard Grossinger and Lindy Hough, NAB has pioneered emergent voices and disciplines while simultaneously bringing into renewed focus older systems and traditions. With more than one thousand books in print, NAB has operated from Berkeley, California, since 1977.

With sales over 600,000, Paul Pitchford’s vital compendium Healing with Whole Foods: Oriental Traditions and Modern Nutrition was the first comprehensive medical cookbook to explain Five Element Theory in Chinese Medicine and apply it to common maladies. T’ai Chi Ch’uan: A Simplified Method of Calisthenics for Health and Self Defense by Cheng Man-Ch’ing was the first book NAB published in California. It became the foundational text for Short Form, the most widespread form of T’ai Chi in the West. Mark Stephens’s best-selling trilogy Teaching Yoga, Yoga Sequencing, and Yoga Adjustments has been a cornerstone in the training of thousands of yoga teachers practicing around the world. Peter Levine’s books—In an Unspoken Voice, Waking the Tiger, and Trauma and Memory—pioneered the field of somatics and have introduced a new generation of therapists to the impacts of trauma.  Stanley Rosenberg’s Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve has helped tens of thousands of readers across the globe understand the essential role of this previously underappreciated nerve. Herbalism is a cornerstone of NAB’s publishing, from Russell Willier’s A Cree Healer and His Medicine Bundle to Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel’s Ashkenazi Herbalism.

The Maya Atlas, which meticulously maps Indigenous rights to land in Belize, was instrumental in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’s declaration in 1998 that Belize had violated the land rights of its Indigenous Mayan population. Balancing on the Mechitza by Noach Dzmura won a Lambda Literary Award for its courageous exploration of the experiences and perspectives of transgender Jews. Radical Dharma by Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Dr. Jasmine Syedullah serves as a vital wake-up call to the ways systemic racism and homophobia manifest within American Buddhism and society at large and offers a path to liberation. Alice Sparkly Kat’s landmark Postcolonial Astrology brings an inclusive, modern, and radical lens to unlock the political power of astrology. The Whale Child, written and illustrated by sister and brother team Chenoa and Keith Egawa, helps middle-grade children our interconnected understand planetary challenges and ways to address them through an Indigenous cosmology.

Decades before ayahuasca’s power as a visionary plant had become globally understood, NAB published Pablo Amaringo’s and Luis Eduardo Luna’s beautiful and comprehensive Ayahuasca Visions. Phoebe Gloecker’s book Diary of a Teenage Girl (later adapted to film) evoked both controversy and acclaim in 2002 for role-modeling a female artist bravely and graphically depicting her own adolescent sexual experience. In 2005, NAB published astrologer Rob Brezsny’s now-classic book, Pronoia Is the Antidote to Paranoia, which suggests that the world is conspiring to fill our lives with blessings. Belly of the Beast by Da’Shaun Harrison is a stunning treatise on the intersections of anti-Blackness and anti-Fatness, and the myths of what constitutes health. Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts has blazed a new understanding of addiction, moving it away from disease and will-power frameworks into a deeper awareness of trauma’s role in addiction and the fundamental need for community and connection.

Over the years, NAB has created several imprints and series—from Frog Books to the Evolver imprint to the Sacred Activism series—but today it focuses on its mainstays: adult and children’s books under North Atlantic Books and martial-books under Blue Snake Books, one of the largest publishers of internal and historical martial-arts books in the world. In 2007 Penguin Random House began distributing NAB books, giving authors access to PRH’s powerful worldwide fulfillment and sales services. North Atlantic remains an independent nonprofit entity, with its own acquisitions, editorial, production, publicity, and marketing staff handling all books from the Berkeley office, where excellent author-publisher relationships are the highest priority.