Creative Publishing + Communications
OctoberWorks is a collaborative imprint where authors shape their voices into thoughtful, beautiful, and intimate book objects—guided by an award-winning design studio with decades of experience in the art of limited-edition publishing.
OctoberWorks was etablished in 2000 by Jeanne Criscola and Deborah Cannarella, making use of emerging technologies to publish and produce works by a diverse range of artists and writers. With the benefit of extensive experience with both print-on-demand and conventional practices, the studio offers at full range of design and editorial services—from conceptual development and line editing to graphic design, production, and final delivery of print and/or digital editions.
Design
Jeanne Criscola is a designer, publisher, artist, and educator whose work integrates design authorship, cultural publishing, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her practice spans publication design, photography, drawing, moving image, installation, generative art, and performance, with projects exhibited internationally and developed through long-term engagement with artists, writers, scholars, and civic organizations. Grounded in decades of work in information design, curatorial leadership, and arts administration, her practice examines how visual form shapes public understanding across books, journals, exhibitions, reports, magazines, and digital platforms.
Through her studio, Criscola Design, she has led award-winning projects in arts and culture, social justice, and public scholarship, designing and producing publications, exhibitions, websites, institutional reports, journals, and books for artists, authors, universities, nonprofits, and international organizations. Her projects for the Open Society Foundations received international recognition, with one publication now held in the Franklin Furnace collection at the Museum of Modern Art.
Her independent publishing initiative, OctoberWorks, operates as a design-led publishing studio and curated imprint producing research-driven books and journals through collaborative editorial development, print-on-demand distribution, and select high-production print partnerships. OctoberWorks titles engage design history, memoir, photography, mental health, public service, and cultural inquiry, emphasizing long-term accessibility, material intelligence, and design as a form of co-authorship.
Criscola serves as design and production lead for The PERCH, a peer-reviewed journal on mental health and social structures published through Yale University in collaboration with Wesleyan University and supported by the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. She is currently developing Centered, an open-call journal focused on trauma, civic storytelling, and interdisciplinary cultural inquiry.
Her work in information design and curatorial leadership began in 1977 with the establishment of the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center Gallery at Brown University, where she directed programming and administration into the early 1980s. She subsequently served as curator and director of the John Slade Ely House Galleries in New Haven through the mid-1980s. Building on this foundation, she founded the Ely Center of Contemporary Art in 2015 to continue the testamentary vision of Grace T. Ely and the legacy of the historic Ely House Galleries. She also co-founded Else Foundation, an interdisciplinary consortium supporting experimental and peer-reviewed creative research initiatives.
Criscola earned an MFA from Transart Institute / University of Danube Krems, a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and an AS in Art from Endicott College. She is Professor of Graphic/Information Design at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut.
Editorial
Deborah Cannarella is a writer, editor, and translator. She has written and edited nonfiction books for adults and children, was editor of two national magazines and various nonprofit publications, and was editor and publications manager for museum exhibition catalogues. She has collaborated with scholars, artists, artisans, and writers to help them best articulate and present their ideas, their work, and their processes. She holds a BA in English literature from Boston University and an MFA from Columbia University in the City of New York in Nonfiction Writing and Literary Translation.
She received the 2014 nonfiction prize from Crazyhorse journal, and her essay/review of Short: An International Anthology of Short Prose, appeared in the fall 2015 issue of Italian Poetry Review.