TRUTH TO POWER
Jamia Wilson of the Feminist Press
A BOOK is a timeless medium that can’t be hacked, surveilled, or used to co-opt movements—as political and insurgent now as it was when the printing press was invented. But too often the stories we’re allowed to tell are dictated by an exclusionary canon, upholding a select few voices and silencing alternatives. At the Feminist Press (FP), the longest-running women’s publishing house in the world, we’re authoring a new story of power in our industry, our culture, our country, and beyond.
Since 1970 we’ve been in the literary vanguard of the feminist movement. Against the backdrop of antiwar protests, student activism, and a growing push for social transformation, we answered an urgent call for books that do justice to the rich complexity of women’s lives. Committed to preserving oft-erased perspectives, we unearthed lost works by writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who were challenging the status quo in their own time. Our founder, Florence Howe, hoped that FP would bring gender equity to publishing in only a decade or two.
As we approach our fiftieth anniversary, our work is still far from complete. While our books have a history of catalyzing transformative change in the literary landscape, the publishing industry continues to elevate voices representing dominant culture over those in the margins.
When only some of us are able to share our stories and enact narrative power, our collective ability to shift culture and create change is diminished.
Publishing, for all its revolutionary potential, remains inaccessible to many because of its deep-seated gatekeeping practices. Our industry is notoriously homogenous, both in its professional composition—79 percent white, 88 percent heterosexual, 99 percent cisgender, and 92 percent nondisabled, according to a 2015 Lee and Low survey—and in the writers and works that get the biggest platforms. By amplifying voices from the margins, we mobilize publishing as an activist tool. Building on our legacy as a home for feminist readers, writers, and activists, we’re fighting back against these ongoing structural disparities by equipping a cohort of emerging creators with the tools to make vital interventions and animate storytelling for social justice.
From our earliest years we have considered ourselves a press of discovery, backing books and writers considered too niche, risky, or controversial. Some of our earliest authors felt they had never before been given the permission to write; many of our new authors find themselves outside of the agented, university-trained, and debt-filled system. In our commitment to specificity of voice and urgency of story, rather than narrowly focusing on sales indicators (known to be biased against writers of color), we provide genuine, sustained support to our authors in ways that are unique to an independent press with a passionate activist ethos. Our titles resonate across genre, age, and location: traversing borders (Knitting the Fog by Claudia D. Hernández), celebrating gender play (Tabitha and Magoo Dress Up Too by Michelle Tea), and linking pop culture to pedagogy (Ain’t I a Diva? Beyoncé and the Power of Pop Culture Pedagogy by Kevin Allred).
Through our annual Louise Meriwether Prize, awarded to a first book by a woman or nonbinary writer of color, we uplift debut authors from marginalized backgrounds. To further increase our cultural impact, we plan to hire more diverse artists to collaborate on our book designs, engaging insurgent creators on both the literary and production ends of the process. We’ve also published more than twenty titles in translation from countries rarely represented in the U.S. literary market, connecting FP readers to a global community and reaffirming our investment in widespread feminist transformation.
A small but mighty team, we practice what we preach, opening professional pathways for all who aspire to work in publishing—including those typically underrepresented in the industry. We’ve also formed invaluable alliances with organizations that share our values, including Tayo Literary Magazine, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Well-Read Black Girl, Soapbox, Fresh Speakers, Girls Write Now, and Jack Jones Literary Arts. These collaborations enable us to engage the revolutionary potential of feminist storytelling through a united front.
It remains inevitable that revolutionary conversations, started on the fringes of society, are drawn in to inhabit the mainstream. History has seen this happen again and again. But while the world certainly appears different from fifty years ago, there will