Best of Dallas 2025: Deep Vellum’s Founder Opens a Window to the World

For our Best of Dallas 2025 issue, celebrating banned books, we spoke with some of the players in Dallas’ book world, including Will Evans of Deep Vellum Books. Coming next week, read our interviews with Akwete Tyehimba from Pan-African Connection and Cassie Nova, a former drag storytime star.

As a graduate student studying Russian literature, Will Evans asked himself what he calls a “very simple question.”
“If I know about great Russian books that are never translated to English, then what about Ukraine?” he says.

What about the rest of the world?

“It led me to start researching into publishing, and I realized that translation is a world that we know very little about,” he says. “So much of the world’s great books in all genres are not available in English.”

That question 15 years ago brought him to a table in Deep Vellum, his nonprofit publishing house and bookstore on Commerce Street, where he spoke recently with the Observer. Sitting at a table in the room where the store hosts author Q&As and other events, speaking in a rapid, machine-gun-fire clip, he recounts Deep Vellum’s history, his view on Dallas’ literary scene and his high hopes for its future.

“Everything is going according to plan,” he says in a wry reference to a Soviet era meme about state planning, or perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comment about the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

In Evans’ case, things are actually going according to plan. When he started the publishing arm of Deep Vellum in 2013 – the bookstore opened in 2015 – his goal was to bring world literature to America and then, five years later, publish Dallas authors.

“The hypothesis was it was just as hard to get published if you’re in Dallas as it is if you’re from, you know, Kiev, which is crazy,” he says. “And it was true, and it’s still true today.”

Deep Vellum today has more books in translation from more languages and more countries than any other publisher, Evans says.

There may be higher-volume publishers of translated books, but Deep Vellum ranks highly for its range and depth in translating books from nearly every continent. Evans is equally proud that Deep Vellum is the leading publisher local authors.

Deep Vellum’s publishing list includes authors from Pleasant Grove to Highland Park, Bishop Arts to West Dallas, and points in between.

Operating as a donation-supported nonprofit, Deep Vellum isn’t placing bets on a mass-market blockbuster to keep the presses running. Publishing books in smaller volumes means each book may cost more, but every author it has published remains on the store’s shelves, waiting for the curious reader to wander in or show up at one of the store’s many free events and stumble across their next great read. His grand plan extends beyond a mere five years. He wants Deep Vellum books to be read 500 years from now.

That might seem a strange goal in an era of audio and ebooks, but Evans isn’t a luddite. He enjoys audiobooks, and the store offers free electronic versions of the paper books he sells.

Likewise, Evans had nothing negative to say about the behemoth that is Amazon (we asked). It rules the bookselling world and offers many of the books he publishes, but wherever readers get books and engage with new ideas and new dialogues or just find entertainment, is fine with him.

What Deep Vellum and the growing number of small, independent bookstores offer is curation, a sense of community and a chance to find something valuable without relying on the giant’s algorithms. Other independent bookstores aren’t his competition, but rather his colleagues in developing the city’s literary culture.

“That’s the take we’re trying to have at Deep Vellum. It’s to look around and say, ‘You’re doing something awesome. … Let’s do something awesome together,'” he says.

The area now boasts dozens of independent bookstores. Evans says there were three when he started Deep Vellum, and he wants to see more – more publishers and stores until every community has its own neighborhood bookstore.

“We’re not going to sleep until you, all 8 million people here and 35 million people in Texas, can look around and see themselves reflected and what they aspire to be in the literature they have access to, right?” he says. “Whether that’s world literature, whether that’s genre literature, whether it’s political, social, poetry, fiction, nonfiction. Whatever it may be, that you can just have access to it and know that it’s there for you, and that you’re a character in that story.”

Deep Vellum Bookstore & Publishing Co., 3000 Commerce St., 469-781-4881, deepvellum.com