The American Literatures Initiative was a five-press publishing collaboration—New York University Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press—confronting the publishing crisis in literature and literary studies, where the annual number of university press books has declined steeply in recent years, placing younger scholars at a disadvantage when writing their first books. Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, it was an innovative, entrepreneurial, cooperative effort to expand the number of books published in literary studies and increase audience reach by using common resources.