Happy end of Women in Translation Month! In this issue:

• A discussion on translation, Colombian literature, and more with Jasmine Jones and Sara Abadía Alvarado;

• Colombian writers Helena Araújo Ortiz, Elisa Mújica, and Josefa Acevedo de Gómez join the Cita Canon;

• Upcoming events in Detroit and San Francisco; and

• More explorations for Women in Translation Month, featuring Nellie Bly (tr. Daniel Saldaña París), Emily Dickinson (tr. Alberto Blanco), Gabriela Mistral, Ursula K. Le Guin…

Extra special thanks this month to Jasmine Jones, whose talent as a reader, editor, and translator has been invaluable this summer while she’s been our editorial intern. Jasmine is the primary author of this month’s Bulletin, and her research on Soledad Acosta de Samper, Helena Araújo Ortiz, Elisa Mújica, and Josefa Acevedo de Gómez has helped us address the lack of information about them available in English. Thank you also to Sara Abadía Alvarado for sharing her process and insights as a translator with us, and for bringing us this month’s Cita Canon entrants!

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A Q&A with writer and translator Sara Abadía Alvarado, by Jasmine Jones

Sara Abadía Alvarado is a Colombian writer and educator. For Cita’s latest title, Dolores: Scenes from a Woman’s Life, Sara updated a nineteenth-century translation to create a new English edition—a process that preserved the language of Acosta de Samper’s period while establishing greater fidelity to the author’s original text and vision. She spoke to Cita editorial intern Jasmine Jones about Dolores, Colombian literature, and her approach to translation.

Soledad Acosta de Samper was invested in defining Colombian national identity in the decades following its establishment as a republic. What impact did encountering her work have on your view of Colombian culture, literary or otherwise?

Since I started my education as a literary scholar in Colombia, I often struggled to find myself within the identities bestowed on the country by its various writers. I could see the landscapes I knew come to life, I could imagine the lives of their inhabitants, and I could see customs, foods, events, history and its horrors —but not necessarily myself. When I first encountered Soledad Acosta’s work, I recognized in her a young woman and an avid reader and writer who, like me, was perpetually starting over in pursuit of her own definition of perfection. When I encountered her, the friction of wanting to be an author and being a young woman became apparent. It still exists for me today, and that I hardly ever saw in Colombian culture. With Dolores specifically, the first of her works that I studied, this mirror was also held up to the protagonist. That makes sense, too —she was a first in her field, only now is she beginning to be studied as one.

Do you notice a difference between Acosta de Samper’s self-translation and the choices of the unnamed translator from the nineteenth-century English translation of Dolores? How would you describe your relationship to this anonymous translator?

Yes. Samper’s self-translation only occurs in the third and final part of the novel —which the unnamed (and in all likelihood male) translator chose to omit. The former, moreover, chose to expand whenever new ideas or reflections emerged, while the latter chose to cut whenever possible. The unnamed translator was writing for an English-speaking audience. He adapted Acosta’s ideas of beauty and comfort and wealth to ones English readers would be able to understand in accordance with their own experiences. He may also have considered the third part, the part where the female protagonist takes up the pen and tells the story herself, unbecoming, or perhaps unsuitable for his intended readership. Acosta, as a writer who never stopped reinventing herself and her art, approached translation as an act of self-editing. She added beautiful passages and expanded on her own ideas of the past, while displaying a knowledge of the English language that allowed her to experiment with sentence structure and meaning to accommodate the new language.

As a translator working more than a century later, I followed the anonymous translation to preserve the ornamentation of its language and their structure as much as possible; but I corrected his interpretations and adjusted his cuts whenever these altered Acosta’s meaning I used my judgement and perspective as a twenty-first-century feminist scholar and writer to preserve the author’s intentions when I sensed they were somewhat obscured or diminished.

You describe your translation process in the foreword to Dolores, but I wanted to ask about the smaller details of that process, what it looks like on the micro level. Do you prefer to translate by hand or typing? Do you mark up the same draft until it emerges polished and complete, or do you start over with blank pages every time you make progress until the final draft is produced?

I always like to keep the original work in my lap and begin on a blank page very early in the morning, typing out my translation with a fresh mind each day. For Dolores I had the marked copy I originally read and studied at university, plus a printed copy of the anonymous translator, and the modern English version of the anthology Mothers of the Word edited by Nina M. Scott. Whether I’m writing or translating, I first need to finish an entire draft before I begin editing and proofreading —it allows my mind to remain immersed in the work’s world and language before the perfectionist in me arrives with corrections.

What does fidelity mean to you as a translator? What does being faithful to Acosta de Samper mean to you?

To me, texts are experiences. They don’t function as these hermetic artifacts that exist to contain a single, immutable truth. They instead exist as agents of meaning-making and transformation. A text is an intention. A text has myriad meanings that transform the reader. They are much closer to living media than people often give them credit for. When I translate, I try to translate the experience of reading a text—that includes fidelity to language and fidelity to meaning, but only in a way that would allow the reader in the other language to share in that experience. Languages shape the way we inhabit the world and so a translator’s job is to know both worlds intimately to communicate them on both sides, within the time and place in which they are alive.

In the context of Women in Translation Month, I can’t help discussing translation as a gendered act. Translation is often coded as feminine, as being subservient to an original. For you as a translator, is there a way to reclaim the feminine, that is, to reclaim translation as equally valuable? Or is there a way to transcend this gendered lens of thinking about translation?

To translate a work is to create another. Every translation brings something completely different to literature and art; this is what allows [works] to coexist and be consumed over and over again. Masculinity has for centuries embraced an idea of originality that we know not to be true. Even when we author texts, they are never without us translating our own experiences as readers and people in relationship with others. Creation is gendered; translation is necessarily gendered as well, this is one of the many threads from which a work is woven. Because women have historically had to navigate multiple social expectations and linguistic registers, I believe many develop forms of translational expertise that deserve greater recognition. This is a strength, and adds value.

Are there any writers or translators that inspire you that you would like to recommend for the Cita Canon?

I would love to see Elisa Mujica, Helena Araújo Ortiz, or Josefa Acevedo represented in the Cita Canon, they seem like the natural next step in my journey as a translator as well (*wink*). I also can’t help but feel like my work on Soledad Acosta isn’t over after Dolores and that a more comprehensive study on her own work as a translator still remains to be undertaken. It would be awesome to see a bilingual edition of hers and another woman writer not often discussed - I know, for example, she published her own translation of Dinah Maria Mulock Craik’s A Woman’s Thoughts about Women.

Further Exploration

On Dolores

• Read Dolores by Soledad Acosta de Samper, in English and in Spanish, for free! Translation and foreword by Sara Abadía Alvarado; cover and visual reading guide by Mariana Sanín A.

• “I endeavor to flee from myself, but always, always thought pursues me…”: Introducing Dolores and our contributors.

• “I am not like them; I flew to a wilderness...”: On reading Dolores through the cover.

• “Who was Soledad Acosta de Samper?” by Jasmine Jones

On Translation

• “Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words” by , for Cita’s Literary Translation and Technology Project, in Asymptote

  • Read Diez días en un manicomio by Nellie Bly, translated by Daniel Saldaña París, for free.

  • A Q&A with Daniel Saldaña París for the Cita Press Bulletin, July 2025.

• Amherst Suite: Emily Dickinson, Spanish Translation & Poetic Transcreation: An open access, bilingual conversation between Emily Dickinson and Alberto Blanco, one of Mexico’s most acclaimed contemporary poets. Indited and translated by Jennifer Rathbun, with an introduction by Ilan Stavans (Amherst College Press, 2026).

• “On Translation,” a seven-episode series of conversations modered by Merve Emre for the podcast The Critic and Her Publics : “To Pay a Translator,””Passing Judgement,” “Practical Translation: ‘The Thousand and One Nights’,” “Is English a Monocrop,” “Shame, Seams, Scars,” “First Sentences,” “Practical Translation: Proust.”

• More from the Cita Press Bulletin:

  • “There is a mystery in things to come“: Women [we want to read] in Translation, feat. Albertina Bertha, Ntšeliseng ‘Masechele Khaketla, and Na Hye-sŏk, August 2025.

  • “Give me your hand” / “Dame la mano”: Gabriela Mistral by way of Langston Hughes, Ursula K. Le Guin, & Samuel Beckett; Soledad Acosta de Samper, Clarice Lispector, & Antonieta de Barros, August 2024.

  • “The deep sea where ideas swim“: A brief overview of WIT Month, highlights of women writers who were also translators (Aphra Behn, George Eliot, Simin Dāneshvar, Alejandra Pizarnik), August 2023.

Cita Canon Spotlight

These three foundational Colombian writers were nominated by Sara Abadía Alvarado. A special mini-publication by Cita Editorial Intern Jasmine Jones that expands upon these biographies is forthcoming.

“To write she had nothing but talent”: Josefa Acevedo de Gómez, 1803-1861

Born in Bogotá on January 23, 1803 to hero of Colombian independence, José Acevedo y Gómez, and Catalina Sánchez de Tejada y Nieto de Paz, Josefa Acevedo de Gómez would come to be known as the first woman author of the republic. She broke the silence of women writers following Mother Francisca Josefa de Castillo from Tunja, the lone voice of the Colombian colonial period. This made her the first woman writer of a civil, not just religious, history of the nation, in direct contrast to Madre Castillo’s monastic writing. Acevedo de Gómez did not shy away from themes of filial piety, romantic love, social morality, and national custom.

Acevedo married a first cousin of her father’s, lawyer Diego Fernando Gómez, whose violent temperament impacted her later writing. The family spent eleven years in an hacienda called El Chocho in Fusagasugá; Acevedo de Gómez gave birth to three children while writing on life in the countryside and domestic labor. Her most important work, Cuadros de la vida privada de algunos granadinos copiados al natural para instrucción y divertimento de los curiosos (Scenes from the private life of a few Granadians copied from reality for the instruction and diversion of the curious) was posthumously published in Bogotá by Imprenta de “El Mosaico” in 1861. The book opens with a short account of her life by José María Vegara y Vegara and is made up of eight short stories that feature figures of Colombian history, forgotten famous figures, and figures of legend. In the prologue of Cuadros de la vida privada José María Vergara y Vergara writes of her: “To write she had nothing but talent: She lacked literary education, time and occasion. However, with talent she did it all and wrote plenty.”1

“How can women define themselves as individuals and as women within Colombian society?”: Elisa Mújica, 1918-2003

Elisa Mújica was a Colombian novelist, essayist, columnist who published novels, short stories, and children’s literature. Part of Grupo Bachué, a modernist collective of artists that rejected Eurocentrism and concerned themselves with Colombian criollo identity, Mújica explored Colombian society and its role in the formation of an individual in her work.

Mújica was born January 21, 1918, in Bucaramanga, Santander Colombia. Her family moved to Bogotá when she was eight years old, and, after her father died when she was fourteen, she joined the ranks of the many other women of her time period who never finished grade school. Her first job was as a secretary for the Ministry of Communications, and she would later work as personal secretary to Carlos Lleras Restrepo, future president of Colombia. Her time as a secretary set her on her path toward letters. By 1943, Mújica was an official of Colombia’s embassy in Quito Ecuador. There she worked as a typist and kept a diary that she maintained between 1943-1982.

While in Quito, Mújica wrote her first novel, Los dos tiempos, which would be published at the periodical Editorial Iqueima in 1949. It tackles socio-political themes, subverting the norms of the then-prevalent literatura costumbrista that privileged narratives about social customs. Her second novel, Catalina, was submitted to the Premio de Literatura Esso in 1962, but lost to Manuel Zapata Olivella’s Detrás del rostro.2 In 1998, a second edition of Catalina was published in Bogotá with a foreword by Montserrat Ordóñez that was critical of the judges of the Esso prize, who identified their choice to publish the book as a “tribute of admiration to the Colombian woman.” Ordóñez notes that the judges’ framing immediately relegated Mújica’s work to the periphery, marking it as a work of the margins—that is, of women— that could not possibly appeal to the Colombian people at large.3

After the somewhat backhanded nature of this early recognition, Mújica’s work would go on to receive many honors. In 1982 Mújica entered the Academia Colombiana de la Lengua and became a member in 1984, the first woman to do so. The Premio de Novela Elisa Mújica was established in 2018 to honor Colombian women writers. In “Elisa Mújica, 1918-2003,” Mary G. Berg writes that Mújica’s work asks: “How can women define themselves as individuals and as women within Colombian society?”4

“Will the woman ever be able to express herself in her own language?”: Helena Araújo Ortiz, 1934-2015

Colombian writer, feminist literary critic, and pioneer in researching Hispanic women’s literature, Helena Araújo Ortiz is best known for her works Signos y mensajes (1976), Fiesta en Teusaquillo (1981) La Scherezada Criolla (1989), Las cuitas de Carlota (2007) y Esposa fugada y otros cuentos (2009). She was born January 20, 1934 in Botogá, the daughter of Emma Ortiz Mearquez and politician Alfonso Arújo Gaviria, who served as Ministro de Hacienda, Alcalde de Bogotá (mayor of Bogotá), a UN representative, and Ambassador to Venezuela and Brazil. She graduated high school in Washington DC in 1949 at the age of fifteen and went on to study literature and philosophy at University of Maryland. She wed athlete Pierre Albrecht de Martini in 1953; they had three children. In this marriage she was introduced to the gendered constraints that society placed on women, which contradicted her relatively unconstrained childhood.

After she expressed a desire to separate, her husband and his family confined her to a mental hospital in Barcelona. The divorce case was taken to an ecclesiastical court in the late sixties, where Araújo Ortiz faced charges for her inability to provide her husband a male child. In 1969 she won the divorce but lost custody of her daughters until their father died in 1971. Reunited with her daughters, Araújo Ortiz’ self-exiled to Switzerland to continue her education. Her first compilation of stories, La M de las moscas (1970) was published by Tercer Mundo. The volume describes a city similar to Bogotá in which an invasion of flies causes people to reflect about what it means to conduct oneself as human. The nonfiction collection Signos y mensajes (1976) lays out her ideas about Latin American, English, and French literature and expands on her 1969 essay “La crítica literaria como bricolage.” The autofictitious La fiesta en Teusaquillo (1981) is a novel of mostly dialogue about a girl named Elsa.

Araújo Ortiz took up theoretical analysis of literature by women in La Scherezada Criolla (1989), a work that was crucial for elevating the work of Latin American women and inspired further research into women writers. In later work, such as in Las cuitas de Carlota (2007) and Esposa fugada y otros cuentos (2009), she continued to build upon autobiographical, feminist, and exile-related themes. Helena Araújo Ortiz died February 2nd, 2015 at the age of 81 in Switzerland.

In the first chapter of La Scherezada Criolla she writes:

“Women who write? Feminine Writing? Will the woman ever be able to express herself in her own language? The truth is that when she finds her style outside of conventional norms, she risks being left out of literature as well. And this risk has to be assumed from the wording and syntax, because as Virginia Woolf says, in addition to the obstacles that the writer encounters in her path, there is the technical difficulty, since ‘the form of the phrase, in itself, does not adapt to the female personality’. But here comes the inevitable question: Does that personality exist? Hasn’t the woman traditionally been a non-personality, a non-presence? Has she not been trained to avoid any chance of wielding her personality or of being detected?”5

What Else?

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Upcoming events:

• October 4, San Francisco: Litquake Out Loud & Book Fair

• October 10-11, Detroit: Detroit Art Book Fair

• October 13, San Francisco: Litquake Festival, National Book Critics Circle and Cita Press present The Author/Critic Dilemma (details tbd)

• October 18, San Francisco: Cita collaborator (Practice Practice) is co-organizer of A Life of Their Own, an all-day symposium celebrating the long lives of books in the hearts and minds of readers.

Do you have an event or project you think might be of interest to readers of the Cita Press Bulletin? Please send details to info@citapress.org. We ask that events and publications be free to access or NOTAFLOF (No One Turned Away for Lack of Funds).

Last month, we introduced the latest Cita title: Dolores: Scenes from a Woman’s Life/Cuadros de la vida de una mujer, featuring a foreword and English translation by Sara Abadía Alvarado and a cover by Mariana Sanín A. We’ll continue to share more about the book, the process of making it, and the threads of influence connecting this project to the work of many others. This month we are:

• Launching our new visual reading guide for the book by Mariana Sanín A;

• Sharing a mini bio in English of Soledad Acosta de Samper by Jasmine Jones;

• Celebrating a scholar-poet who helped recover Acosta de Samper’s legacy and a prolific writer Acosta herself amplified through translation; and

• Recapping recent and upcoming Cita events!

Thank you to Mariana Sanín A. for letting us into her imagination as a reader and illustrator, and to Sara Abadía Alvarado for sharing the story of Soledad’s translation of Dinah Mulock Craik with us.

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Drawing Dolores: words, landscapes, la soledad

Dolores is a story of isolation, longing, and loss. But it is also about a version of freedom that exists within self-exile. When Dolores removes herself from society, she no longer lives with the expectations (and the hopes) that come with being an upper-class young woman in nineteenth-century Colombia. Retiring to a cottage appointed to suit her tastes and needs, she has nothing but time to consider big existential questions about life, faith, and love—and to write out her thoughts.

What doesn’t change between the earlier period of her young adulthood, with its festivities and social attachments, and her time alone is the vibrancy of the natural world around her and her engagement with it. The picture Acosta de Samper paints of Colombia teems with the colors, sounds, and a diverse array of living beings. Both Dolores’ childhood home and in the mountaintop cottage of her exile house her fantastic aviary and her collection of flowering plants, framed by dramatic landscapes. And, even when she is completely alone, language gives Dolores a way to connect with others and to share her thoughts, through letters and her diary.

As publishers of a new bilingual edition, Cita has many things to consider. How can we invite readers who have never heard of Dolores, of Soledad Acosta de Samper, into a text from 150+ years ago? How can we tease the richness, the color, and the themes—all thoughtfully translated for readers in English by Sara Abadía Alvarado? The first place to start is the cover.

In her cover illustration for Cita’s edition of Dolores, Marian Sanín A. dug deep into the text and emerged with a set of images, which she then wove together. Stamps and the crease of a folded letter give a sense of the novel’s epistolary passages. Flora and fauna populate the frame. Acosta de Samper’s handwriting fills the bottom right corner, acknowledging the novella’s explosive final pages containing the author’s self-translation, an act of restoration Abadía explores in the foreword. And, soaring through the center is la soledad.

La soledad is a name used across Colombia to refer to the momotus aequatorialis, a colorful bird with a solitary nature who makes a home in the mountains. “Soledad” means “loneliness.” The bird is a fitting symbol of Soledad Acosta de Samper’s first and most famous protagonist, an unforgettable young woman who, despite fate’s burden for her, takes charge of her own solitude.

Mariana explains: “What I enjoyed most about this process was combining illustration, archive, and reading to create something meaningful.” Learn more about how she did this, as a reader and as an illustrator, in the guide she made for us, available to download and share freely.

“One of the most distinguished of Latin America”

In the last few decades, Colombian scholars like Carolina Alzate, Isabel Corpas de Posada, and Montserrat Ordóñez have brought Soledad Acosta de Samper—one of Colombia’s most prolific and influential writers—back into the public eye. Today, at least 650 titles by and about her are freely available to all via the Biblioteca Digital de Soledad Acosta de Samper, and new editions of her work continue to appear, including Cita’s.

Despite this growing re-recognition, there is little about her easily available in translation. Her English-language Wikipedia page, for example, is essentially a stub. To help address this, Cita’s Jasmine Jones created a brief biography of the author in English. Read it for a glimpse into a remarkable life that involved lots of travel, politics, loss, and writing.

Cita Canon Spotlight

This month’s canon entrants showcase the collaborative stewardship among women writers across different centuries, countries and landscapes.

Poet and scholar Montserrat Ordóñez (1941-2001) was born in Barcelona to a Colombian father and Catalan mother. At fifteen she moved to Bucaramanga, capital of the Colombian department of Santander. She received a degree in Modern Languages from the Universidad de los Andes and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ordóñez would later become a Professor Titular at the Universidad de los Andes. She spoke Spanish, English, Catalan, and Portuguese.

A prolific lecturer, editor, translator, journalist, literary critic, and scholar, Ordóñez specialized in literature written and read by women and she published her work in magazines across Europe and the Americas. As a leading scholar responsible for restoring the legacy of 19th century Colombian author Soledad Acosta de Samper, Ordóñez published an edition of Una selección de escritos de Soledad Acosta de Samper in 1988. In 2004, an edition of Soledad Acosta de Samper’s Novelas y cuadros de la vida sur americana co-edited with Carolina Alzate was published. Her many articles on Acosta de Samper along with new editions of Acosta de Samper’s work in collaboration with other scholars helped restore Soledad Acosta de Samper to her rightful place as a pioneer of Colombian and Latin American literature.

Ordóñez was awarded the Premio de Literatura Latinoamericana Gabriela Mistral for her book of poems De piel en piel (Ekdysis): poemas, sombras, versiones posthumously in 2002, and remains a heavily cited scholar and artist among her contemporaries and literary successors.

[“Bad Girl”/ “Una niña mala” by Montserrat Ordóñez, translated by Clara Eugenia Ronderos for Instituto Cervantes’ Observatorio]

—

Starting in 1878, Soledad Acosta de Samper serialized her own translation of A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, an 1858 “advice book” by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1826-1887), in her magazine, La Mujer. In her introduction, Acosta describes Craik as “una de las más afamadas escritoras modernas” (“one of the most renowned modern writers”) in England. Indeed, during her lifetime, Craik enjoyed decades of commercial and critical success as a novelist. Her novel John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) remains in print today.

Dinah Mulock’s childhood was tumultuous, and she was left destitute at nineteen when her mother died and her father abandoned the family. She sold poems, stories, articles, and translations to various magazines, journals, and annuals while also publishing children’s books. In 1848, she published her first adult novel, The Ogilvies, and from there her success and reputation grew. She lived a vibrant, independent life, fostered a network of women writers (or “bevy of attendant maidens,” as Margaret Oliphant put it), and hosted many parties. Though she eventually married George Lillie Craik, an accountant eleven years her junior, domestic life did not inhibit her career. She continued to publish novels and short pieces, and to mentor other writers. In an unusual move for the time, she and George adopted a daughter, Dorothy, from a workhouse. Marriage and motherhood transformed public conception of “Miss Mulock,” with “Mrs. Craik” becoming a model of Victorian matronhood, despite the bold ideas about gender and class espoused in works like A Woman’s Thoughts.1

Dinah Mulock Craik died in 1887, shortly before her daughter’s wedding. Her last words were reported to be: “Oh, if I could live four weeks longer! but no matter, no matter!” Her words, however, do live on.

[Dinah Maria Craik by Sally Mitchell (1983), reprinted in the Victorian Web]

What Else?

Last Saturday, editorial director Jessi Haley hosted “New Life in the Public Domain” at the Harvey Milk Memorial Branch of the San Francisco Public Library as part of SFPL’s Summer Stride series. The event explored avenues for drawing inspiration and more from the public domain:

• Peruse resources in this guide (some SFPL-specific, many general).

• Enjoy an example from the talk by watching Maya Deren’s experimental feminist classic Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, in the public domain), with an original score (2024) by Glasgow-based composer and sound designer Martyna Szmigiero.

The following day, JoAnn Borri, the guest editor and foreword writer for A Luminous Halo: Selected Writings by Virginia Woolf, was a featured reader at an event celebrating Virginia Woolf for the literary series Patron Saints of Influence in Santa Rosa. JoAnn shared the story of coming to Woolf as a reader and, eventually, to A Luminous Halo, and was joined by Dinika Amaral, M.M. Olivas, and some great poets and prose writers who participated in the open mic.

We’ll be back in San Francisco for Litquake this fall, starting with the Book Fair on Sunday, October 4! We will have Dolores merch…

Tomorrow marks the first day of Women in Translation Month, which we’ll be celebrating on Instagram and in next month’s Bulletin (with Sara Abadía Alvarado).

Finally, thank you to all who have become a Cita Press Book Friend! Sign up by August 15 to get on the first round for print material mailing. We’re grateful for the support, which allows us to keep amplifying our feminist forebears while working with contemporary contributors around the world.

We are excited to launch the latest book to join the Cita Press digital bookshelf: Dolores by Soledad Acosta de Samper. This text, which we present in the original Spanish and in a new English translation by Sara Abadía Alvarado, is a significant landmark in Colombian, and feminist, literature that has long been overdue for wider readership.

This month’s Bulletin is the first, but not the last, to dig into Dolores. We’ll also:

• Share some resources for exploration that will carry you past Pride Month into everyday engagement with foundational queer art and literature;

• Introduce “Book Friends” — our new membership program; and

• Celebrate our new team member and an upcoming event at the San Francisco Public Library!

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Introducing Dolores

Dolores: Cuadros de la vida de una mujer (Scenes from Woman’s Life) was initially published in serial form in 1867 in Bogotá newspaper El Mensajero, before appearing in the collection Novelas y cuadros de la vida sur-americana.1 It was the first full-length work of fiction by Soledad Acosta de Samper, a groundbreaking Colombian author, journalist, historian, feminist and publisher. The novella follows a spirited young woman whose life is upended by a devastating family secret shortly after she falls in love for the first time. While honing in on one family’s story, and the ways their personal drama ripples through communities, the text reflects on societal attitudes towards gender, class, love, and illness—revealing what has (and hasn’t) changed across centuries. While doing so, it gives us an immersive portrait of nineteenth-century Colombia, rendering landscapes, public life, and elements of nature in gorgeous detail.

Much of the book is narrated by the protagonist’s cousin, Pedro, who is also navigating youthful romance and questions around his own identity. When we meet Dolores it is through Pedro’s eyes, as he and his friend Antonio watch her pass by at the start of a festival. In a sea of colorful revelers, she “stood out, like a precious lily in the middle of a field, the most beautiful flower of the district.” In fact, her beauty is so precious that the opening discussion of it foreshadows the tragedy its holder will encounter.

Throughout the story, the sights, sounds, and emotions we encounter are vivid and absorbing. But the tone changes as the perspective shifts and Dolores’ voice pokes through Pedro’s narration. While readers start as outsiders—distant admirers of a lovely young woman—by the end of the book we have access to the darkest recesses of that woman’s soul.

For Cita’s English edition, Colombian writer Sara Abadía Alvarado updated a nineteenth-century translation, preserving the language of Acosta de Samper’s period while also rethinking certain approaches, ultimately establishing greater fidelity to Samper’s original text and vision. Two known copies of the older translation exist: one in the archives of the Banco de la República and one at the University of Iowa. These have been digitized, and neither credit a translator nor a publishing house. For reasons that we can only guess at, the unnamed translator or their publisher chose to leave out the crucial final section of the book, which contains the most transgressive and explicitly feminist passages. It is the section that, as Sara puts it in the foreword, gives Dolores “the final word in her own story.” However, Banco de la República’s copy contains a remarkable addendum: manuscript pages filling in the missing parts—in Acosta de Samper’s own handwriting.

Read Sara’s foreword to learn more about the text, the subversiveness of its structure, and her approach to restoring Acosta de Samper’s voice to the English version. And, as you enter the world of the book, note the handwriting that Mariana Sanín A. integrated into the cover, pulled directly from the nineteenth-century manuscript to bring Soledad’s touch to our edition.

We’re endlessly grateful to Sara, who brought this project to us and, in doing so, fulfilled a long-held ambition to include Soledad Acosta de Samper in the Cita catalog. We’re also grateful to Mariana for weaving together a close reading of the text and loving attention to nineteenth-century graphic design to create the cover, a dream approach for us. Finally, we thank Carolina Alzate and Monserrat Ordóñez for the scholarship and advocacy that made this book possible, and Sharon Bard for sponsoring this title.

You can read Dolores now, for free, in English and in Spanish. “Why Soledad Acosta de Samper’s Dolores is a Unicorn in the Practice of Translation” by Sara Abadía Alvarado, is now up at Literary Hub, alongside an excerpt from the book. Downloadable formats are coming soon, as is a visual reading guide, and more...

About our contributors

Sara Abadía Alvarado is a Colombian writer and educator. She studied Literature at Universidad de los Andes, where she first encountered the work of Soledad Acosta de Samper. She currently lives in Boston, where she teaches theater to young people in East Boston. She writes with deliberate ambition and a sustained belief in literature’s power to outlast time.

More of Sara’s work:

• En medio de una noche eterna is Sara’s debut novel, from Icono Editorial. It was written during her Master’s program in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU, under the supervision and guidance of Rita Indiana, Amelia Bande, and Silvina López Medín.

• Pies y perras: A collection from Laguna Libros that brings together thirteen women writing in Spanish in New York, each using fiction or poetry to explore the “other” in culture and in nature.

• “Anamorfosis,” a story, was selected for Antología Volumen III: Crónica, cuento, microrrelato, poesía y relato, a publication of the Feria Internacional del Libro de la Ciudad de Nueva York.

Mariana Sanín A. is an illustrator and designer from Colombia. She also likes writing poems, short stories and haikus for children (and grownups).

More of Mariana’s work:

• Herida de tigre y flor: A frame-by-frame animation printed in risograph, which later became a flipbook in collaboration with La Bruja Riso.

• “La abuela, la hormiga, lo dulce y la muerte,” from : A piece about the artist’s grandmother, paired with two poems.

Cita Canon Spotlight

Soledad Acosta de Samper joined the Cita Canon in 2024, but readership has grown since then, and we are celebrating her in more detail this month.

Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833-1913) was one of the most prolific authors of her time. In the early decades following the republic’s 1863 Constitution, she expanded not just possibilities for other women writers, but for modern Colombian literature in general. To quote Sara Abadía Alvarado, from the foreword of our edition of Dolores:

Soledad Acosta de Samper spoke English, traveled the world, wrote every day, and saved the newspaper clippings in which her novels appeared to turn them into albums. She married for love, had four daughters—one of them, a nun and a poet, published the version of the Novena de Aguinaldos that is sung during the nine days leading up to Christmas in Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador—founded five magazines, established herself as a journalist and historian, fought for women’s place in society, and resisted the censorship imposed on her most renowned female protagonist today in Latin America: Dolores.

Despite her enormous influence, Acosta de Samper nearly disappeared from public consciousness in the century following her death. In the last two decades, dedicated scholars have worked to preserve and amplify her remarkable legacy. In 2013, as part of a yearlong national celebration of the writer, her entire body of work was digitized. In 2019, the Universidad de los Andes and the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia launched the Biblioteca Digital Soledad Acosta de Samper, which now houses over 600 archival works. A new Spanish-language edition of Dolores (the fourth in 150 years) was published by Ediciones Uniandes in 2021 with a foreword by Carolina Alzate. Cita Press hopes to build on these efforts by connecting international readers to Acosta de Samper's work, highlighting contemporary writing, scholarship, and design in the process.

[“Soledad Acosta de Samper” by Diana Duarte Salinas, at Mapping Latin American Women’s Intellectual Networks; Biblioteca Digital Soledad Acosta de Samper]

Announcing “Book Friends”

Alongside Dolores, which is one of the final publications of our Scaling Small grant project, we’re launching our “Book Friends” membership program! For the first time, we’re inviting readers to support our work directly.

Cita Book Friends are people who believe feminist publishing should be open, global, and sustainable. People who want to preserve and build on the foundation created by feminist pioneers, and to participate in sharing knowledge with everyone. Join now so we can keep growing our library —hiring writers, designers, and translators in the process—and to ensure that readers everywhere can access that work freely.

Visit our campaign page to join or learn more about the program, including membership tiers and perks.

Book Friends joins Cita Studio as a program that generate revenues for the Press during a time when funding for projects like ours continues to disappear. We are grateful for any and all forms of support, especially those that further our mission through your attention and engagement: reading our books, subscribing to or sharing this newsletter, taking the time to learn about an author or artist who deserves more recognition.

You may get very occasional emails from us, separate from the Cita Press Bulletin, about joining Book Friends. If you’d like to opt out of this, or have questions or feedback, let us know at info@citapress.org.

Enjoy this sneak peek at our adorable mascot, the titular Book Friend—designed by Mariana Matos.

Welcome, Jasmine Jones!

We recently welcomed our 2026 Cita Press Editorial Intern: Jasmine Jones! Jasmine is a recent graduate of the University of Chicago’s Master of the Arts Program in the Humanities, where she specialized in creative writing. She also received a bachelor’s degree in English and Spanish language and literatures from University of Chicago. She is currently working on a gothic magical realist novel, and is a budding literary translator who completed her first short story translation project from Spanish to English in May. Jasmine was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and is currently based in Chicago.

Jasmine has already jumped head first into helping us tell the story of Dolores, in both Spanish and English. We are thrilled to work with her, and grateful to UChicago’s MAPH for sponsoring our internship program.

Check out this digital zine Jasmine co-created with Avery Echols for UChicago’s Black Studies Lab: Are We Losing Recipes? An Archival Recipe Book of Black Diasporic Culture.

What Else?

• Jessi Haley, Cita’s editorial director, will be hosting a conversation on finding “New Life in the Public Domain” on July 25 at the Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Learn more here.

• If you aren’t on Instagram or otherwise missed our Pride Month posting, here are some highlights from our research:

  • Alec Pollak on “Lorraine Hansberry’s Queer Archive”, for The Yale Review

    • “Lorraine Hansberry: Playwright at Work” (1961) from ALL ARTS Vault

    • Read all four of Hansberry’s published “Emily Jones” stories in open archives:

      • “The Anticipation of Eve,” from ONE, via Jstor and Reveal Digital

      • “Chanson de Konallis, ” from The Ladder, via Internet Archive

      • “Renascence,” from ONE, via Internet Archive

      • “The Budget,” from ONE, via Internet Archive

  • The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, which also shares tools for doing archival work with care

  • Digital exhibits from the ArQuives, Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives

  • Malflora Collective, a community project dedicated to preserving the everyday lives, memories, and legacies of Latina/e lesbians— including a podcast!

  • Books by lesbian pulp fiction icon Ann Bannon on Project Gutenberg

  • Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers by Robert Giard

    • Note: The photographs collected in Particular Voices are under copyright. Robert Giard’s estate has generously granted free access to explore them via both the New York Public Library Digital Collections and the Robert Giard Foundation website, and request that they not be shared on social media or in other platforms where attribution and provenance can be lost.

  • More on our Are.na research channel!

In I Call to Remembrance: Toyo Suyemoto’s Years of Internment, Japanese American poet Toyo Suyemoto reflects on the “uneasy spring of 1942.” Following the issuance of Executive Order 9066 that February, rumors of pending forced removal loomed over her family: infiltrating, but not fully disrupting, the challenges and joys of everyday life.

Of the morning the Suyemotos learned they were to be “evacuated,” Suyemoto writes:

Certain natural events like the punctuality of the changing seasons disregard the way people treat one another, and they enchant the observer with the perfection of the moment. So the wisteria bloomed again and purpled the exterior of an old church near the campus, and the new grass turned the winter-drab ground to a brisk green.

Morning in our household began with clatter, the sounds of a large family waking, one by one. There was a steady procession to the bathroom, then assembly around the breakfast table, and a gradual diminishing of voices as my brothers and sisters departed for school…This morning was not unlike the others that our family had experienced in this rented house.

The family was first moved from their Berkeley home to a temporary camp at the Tanforan Race Track in San Bruno, where Toyo experienced an “abrupt gap” in her writing. After being transferred to the Central Utah Relocation Center (Topaz), however, the poet returned to her pen, spurred on by the camp’s creative community.1 Decades later, Lawson Fusao Inada referred to her as “our major Camp Poet and Nikkei Poet Laureate.”

While Suyemoto’s memoir recounts a specific historical circumstance that had a devastating impact on her family, her remembrances likely carry powerful familiarity for many twenty-first-century readers. We’ve all lived through seismic change in recent years, most of it related to “the way people treat one another.” Throughout various catastrophes, we’ve gone to work, done chores, and watched the seasons change. And we’ve turned to art—sharing it, creating it—to make sense of it all.

This month, we’re exploring the relationships between making art and living in the world together, by way of:

• A conversation with writer and producer Christie George on creating a “book report” in response to Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, and other “projects that bring our personal and collective responses from the margins to the center”;

• Inviting Toyo Suyemoto and prose writer Arundhati Roy to the Cita Canon;

• Teasing upcoming publications, events, and more.

Special thanks to Christie George for helping us create this issue, and for collaborating with us on recent in-person programming. Subscribe to Practice Practice to follow her work!

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On The Emergency Was Curiosity and cultivating creative attention

Christie George came into the Cita Press orbit through the Sitting Room Library, our publication partner for A Luminous Halo: Selected Writings by Virginia Woolf. First, we met her through her book: The Emergency Was Curiosity, which was on display in a exhibit alongside How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell’s meditation on “resisting the attention economy.” How to Do Nothing is the inspiration for Christie’s project, which interpolates Odell’s ideas through close reading, photographs, drawings, charts, memories, and conversations. On a personal level, The Emergency Was Curiosity is both a pandemic diary and a synthesis of decades of reading, research, and curiosity. For readers, The Emergency Was Curiosity is—like How to Do Nothing—a call to action, an invitation to rethink how you participate in the world.

George has labeled the project a “book report,” but it is certainly not homework. A book report, to George, is a web woven around both its creator and its core source text, bringing many other thinkers into its structure. Thus The Emergency Was Curiosity is a deeply individual exploration that is built on a foundation of collective thought. Other books, essays, poems, projects and conversations are threaded throughout; George’s experiences and imagination provide the needle.

Sharing The Emergency Was Curiosity with the public sparked a series of collaborative projects tied together by the Togethering Lab, the initiative Christie runs with her partner. These have included virtual zine workshops, professional incubators, and place-based memory activities, all focused on “cultivating creative attention.” Encouraging others to make their own book reports is a key element in a lot of these efforts.

Christie has collaborated with us on in-person programming like Transcribe Harper pizza parties, the Santa Rosa Zine Fest, and a Sitting Room round table. Her collaborative approach is a natural fit for open knowledge projects, but what resonates with Cita most is the relational aspect of her work. She is interested in interrogating what reading is, what writing is, and the essential links between life, art, and each other—on and off the page.

Christie also uses the term “fan nonfiction” to frame her work. Though her definition centers the genre of inspiration (see below), the idea of various forms of “fan” creation as an alternative to more traditional scholarship echoes a lot of what we do with Cita. We are often building relationships with authors who we can’t ever know in a personal sense, as decades or centuries have passed since they were here to speak for themselves. Engaging with feminist thinkers of the past comes with responsibility and inherent asymmetry. Our work ideally functions as a form of stewardship, but it risks veering into misrepresentation, or worse: appropriation. Despite these risks, we believe in the possibility of relationships that transcend time and space, of building ongoing understanding, and of generating new work that honors predecessors who have confronted and reimagined their own times. Christie George’s work provides some models for doing this, together.

A Q&A with Christie George

The following represents a conversation between Christie George and Cita editorial director Jessi Haley that took place across Google docs, email, and Zoom, and that builds on IRL discussions. Here’s to continuing the conversation, on- and off-line, and bringing in more people in the process!

Can you share your working definition of “fan nonfiction”? What does it mean to take on “projects that bring our personal and collective responses from the margins to the center”?

Fan nonfiction is a riff on the genre of fan fiction. According to Wikipedia, fan fiction is “fiction typically written in an amateur capacity by fans as a form of fan labor, unauthorized by, but based on, an existing work of fiction.” Fan nonfiction is a work of unapologetic fandom about a work of nonfiction. It’s not necessarily a critique or a review (although it may be critical). It is more than likely admiring, but more than anything else it is responsive and dialogic—a reader in direct conversation with the subject (or object?) of their admiration. Like fan fiction, fan nonfiction involves engaging one’s own imagination in active relation to an author’s ideas, creating something new in the process.

Many people (I’m guessing some Cita Press people are these kinds of people) mark up their books as they read, underlining passages as they go, scribbling their reactions in the margins. Marginalia is often considered minor, nonessential, secondary. But it is this work in the margins that I find most interesting, most relatable—sometimes even more so than the original text. In my work, I’m offering an invitation to consider book reports, fan nonfiction and marginalia as sites of substance and promise.

Throughout The Emergency Was Curiosity, there is a meta examination of the project, and its purpose. At one point you pose the question: “What would you make if you weren’t trying to be understood by anyone else?” Can you say more about what it feels like to make something that may be purely personal, or may be something you share—and how that shapes the creative process?

I feel quite certain that I would never have started my project, much less finished it, if I had had an audience in mind. An audience of myself is what allowed me to just move through the process of creation without listening to an inner critic. And even then, I still questioned why I was doing something so “unproductive.” That said, making this project was so much fun and gave me so much pleasure, it became about unlearning ideas about productivity and value. In other words, I learned that doing something just for myself—not for work, not for money, not for an external audience—had value in and of itself.

At some point, right before printing the book, I decided that I wanted to get some feedback on it. The draft wound up in the hands of a reader who did not know me but turned out to be the single most comprehending reader of the project.

That initial exchange of sharing my book with one person was so affecting that I decided to keep doing it. I’ve shared the book via more traditional book talks but also through exhibitions, zine-making workshops, bird walks. My practice has evolved from being an individual exploration of reading one book to something more like a group project cultivating collective creative attention. I often say that collaboration has become both the means and the end of my creative practice. At this point, it is simply less interesting to me to be working on things alone. While I am still the primary driver of my projects, they have a more collective shape.

Your book draws from wide and varied reading, with other works orbiting your examination of How to Do Nothing. It tracks how what you’re reading influences your activities and approach to your own life, and vice versa. Is this a conscious practice that existed for you before this project, is it something you became aware while making the book, or something else?

I’ve always taken notes on books, or copied passages that I liked and wanted to remember, but a couple of things were really different with this project:

1. The depth of engagement with just one book. My project is almost as long (232 pages!) as Jenny’s book itself.

2. I experimented with so many different creative forms: watercolor, collage, illustration.

The book report was a beautiful container to just try new things in a very low-stakes environment since the initial audience just was myself. And my process really felt like it embodied the message in Jenny’s book. As her friend Josh observes in this New York Times profile of her work, “She wants you to have an experience, not to listen to her.”

The books I read not only influence how I think and what I’m working on, but they’ve also become a way for me to mark time. Time has become so elastic, especially after the pandemic, but I now use books as a way to track particular seasons in my life. For example, if someone were to ask me about a specific date or even a year, I would probably just draw a blank. But if you asked me what things were like when I was reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, I could tell you what chair I was sitting in, what the weather was like. Books almost instantaneously situate me in place and time, and, most importantly, feeling.

Some of your recent projects include curating the events that make up The Art of Midlife: Don’t Call It a Crisis at Local Economy in Oakland. The series brings writers and artists together to talk about bodies, care, style and more. You’ve also organized events around the relationships between mothering and creative work. What are some of the patterns you’re seeing through engaging people around these ideas? Have you learned anything surprising?

In general, I have become interested in more collective forms of knowledge work as compared to the myth of individual thought leadership. Even Jenny identifies herself as “one weaver among many in the tapestry that is culture.” The only sensemaking that makes any sense to me is collective sensemaking. I also tend to be interested in ideas that have been underrepresented or misrepresented in the culture, and I think the only way to figure anything out about them is through collective inquiry.

Initially, my more recent projects—about midlife, about mothering—seemed sort of random to me, and not necessarily connected to my book report project. But the gift of How to Do Nothing was in helping me pay attention to my own attention, to what I am interested in, to what I am curious about. So these latest interests and exploring them with other people feels directly connected to my work on Jenny’s book.

In terms of patterns, what I’ve learned is that although I start these projects simply because I’m interested in them, if I’m interested, then probably some other people are, too. Writing about my interests publicly (through the newsletter ) is a way to not only explore in public but also to connect with others. Someone said to me, “You’ve got to howl to find your pack.” So one way I think of my public writing is as a means of finding other people that share these interests and building with them. And then we can do cool things together. (Like me and you!)

The other pattern I’ve noticed is that my own practice is a lot about permission, permission to pursue personal interests freely even if they’re not legible to other people. By modeling this myself, I am giving other people permission to pursue their own small, weird projects, a frame coined by my friend Courtney Martin and which continues to guide me.

The primary thing I’ve learned is that although I didn’t need anyone else to create my project, now that it is out in the world, it exists in the same attention economy as every other piece of content, entertainment and knowledge work. My intention for this project is for it to find its people, but it’s hard to know exactly what to do with it in order for that to happen. In a past life, I was an indie film distributor, so I should have known that this part would be the hardest, but it has still taken me by surprise.

Any recommendations you’d like to share with Bulletin readers? Something you’ve read/watched/encountered recently, or any upcoming event or project?

I’m reading a book right now that I think will be of interest to Bulletin readers: Riverwork by Lisa Robertson. The story follows a cleaner in Paris who inherits her missing aunt’s research about the buried Bièvre river. From the publisher’s description, “Riverwork unearths not just an urban river but also a philosophy of research and the archive, a politics of hydrology, an ontology of ageing and belatedness, and a consideration of the unrepresented labour of women, past and present.”

In the fall, I will be co-hosting a symposium in San Francisco about book reports, marginalia and other formats that facilitate deep engagement with the books that influence us. The symposium will take place in October during National Book Month and in collaboration with Problem Library and Same Page SF.

Further Exploration: The Emergency Was Curiosity

• Download The Emergency Was Curiosity (free!) or purchase a (beautiful) physical copy here.

• “In Defense of Useless Projects”: a visual essay by Christie George.

• Christie’s guide to creating your own book report, via .

• We made a “book report” of sorts for An Immortal Book: Selected Writings by Sui Sin Far. Download the book and its reading guide, “The Divine Right of Learning,” for free here.

Cita Canon Spotlight

Thank you to Christie George for nominating Arundhati Roy this month! This month’s Canon inductees both explored political realities through their art. Trace the full Cita Canon as it grows.

Toyo Suyemoto (1916-2003) began writing poetry in the fifth grade, inspired by her mother. Before the outbreak of World War II, she studied English at Berkeley and published poems across various Japanese American publications. Shortly after separating from her husband, Suyemoto was incarcerated with her infant son, Kay, and her extended family at Tanforan and then Topaz concentration camps. At Topaz, she worked in the camp’s ad hoc library and school and, alongside her friend Miné Okubo, for the literary magazines Trek and All Aboard. She contributed several poems to these publications, her language capturing the natural features of the Utah desert while illuminating the human context framing the poems’ composition.

While at Topaz, Suyemoto sent her work off to mainstream literary journals; two poems appeared in The Yale Review in 1946. She moved to Ohio after the war, where she worked in libraries at the University of Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and, eventually, The Ohio State University. At Ohio State, she built a career across three decades and became Head of the Social Work Library and Assistant Head of the Education Library. Later in her life, her poetry began to draw a wider audience, when younger Asian American writers like Lawson Fusao Inada and Frank Chin (two of the editors of Aiiieeeee!) sought out her work and her stories.

Suyemoto’s son, Kay, died in 1958 at age sixteen from respiratory disease caused by the conditions at Tanforan. In her later decades, she devoted herself to sharing the realities and consequences of internment through lectures, interviews, and her writing. In 1981, she testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, describing what happened to Kay and to other children living in the camps. “It is for my son’s sake that I have just completed writing the first draft of a book on my internment years,” she explained. That memoir, I Call to Remembrance: Toyo Suyemoto’s Years of Internment, was finally published in 2007, four years after the poet’s passing.

[Toyo Suyemoto at Densho Encyclopedia; “Soft silver interwoven with quick fire”: Grant Din interviews Toyo Suyemoto for East Wind, 1984]

In the 2001 essay “The Ladies Have Feelings So…Shall We Leave It to the Experts?,” Arundhati Roy (b. 1961) compares the term “writer-activist” to “sofa-bed.” She notes that the label started popping up when, following the enormous success of her debut novel The God of Small Things, she turned to writing essays on politics. “Now, I’ve been wondering why it should be that the person who wrote The God of Small Things is called a writer, and the person who wrote the political essays is a called an activist?” It is isn’t simply genre that inspires “-activist” to be tacked onto “writer,” Roy asserts, but rather the reality that, as she puts it: “I take a position. I have a point of view.” She rejects the idea that doing so makes her less of a “writer.”

Indeed Roy’s entire career, across genres, forms, and fields, reflects her commitment to sharing a point of view. Roy was raised by her mother, Mary Roy, a women’s rights activist from Ayamanam, Kerala (the setting of The God of Small Things). She studied architecture in New Delhi and began her career at the National Institute of Urban Affairs before pivoting to film and television. Her screenplay for the 1989 television movie In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones dramatized her experiences as an architecture student and won her the National Film Award for Best Screenplay. (She also acted in the film.) It screened theatrically for the first time earlier this year at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997. Roy’s second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, came out twenty years later. Her nonfiction collections include The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, and My Seditious Heart. Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy’s latest book, tells the story of her mother as well as her own coming to be as a writer.

[An interview with Arundhati Roy in The Yale Review, 2026; “For the Lovers, For the Haters”: Arundhati Roy in conversation with Parvathy Thiruvothu at the 2024 Wayanad Literary Festival]

What Else?

• The next Cita Press title is out very soon! We’re very excited for this one, which will bring a “new-old” translation of an essential Colombian feminist novella to readers in English, alongside the original Spanish text. Curious? We’ll be revealing more in coming weeks, and next month’s Bulletin…

• “I am a woman in my thirties, and I am thriving”: Read Cita founder Juliana Castro Varón in The New Yorker’s “Shouts & Murmurs” column.

• SAVE THE DATE! We’re talking about “New Life in the Public Domain” for the San Francisco Public Library’s Summer Stride series. Catch us at the Eureka Valley branch on July 25!

“GAIN” by Toyo Suyemoto

I sought to seed the barren earth
And make wild beauty take
Firm root, but how could I have known
The waiting long would shake

Me inwardly, until I dared
Not say what I would gain
From such untimely planting, or
What flower worth the pain?

—Trek, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Dec. 1942)

For poetry month, we present poems from the public domain, with brief portraits of the women who wrote them:

• “The Serving Girl” by Gladys May Casely-Hayford/Aquah Laluah (1927, Sierra Leone)

• “Retrato” by Luisa Pérez de Zambrana (c. 1854, Cuba), translated by Liz Henry

• “To the Ladies” by Lady Mary Chudleigh (1703, England)

These poems confront the expectations and lack of opportunities for women in ways that continue to ring true. In style they are slippery, layered, and surprising. All three poets led fascinating lives. Together we can help keep their legacies from being lost to time.

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We hope you enjoy these poems, and the illustrations by Mariana Matos. Read to the end for upcoming events and further exploration.

——–

“The Serving Girl,” Gladys May Casely-Hayford

The calabash wherein she served my food,
Was smooth and polished as sandalwood:
Fish, as white as the foam of the sea,
Peppered, and golden fried for me.
She brought palm wine that carelessly slips
From the sleeping palm tree’s honeyed lips.
But who can guess, or even surmise
The countless things she served with her eyes?

From Caroling Dusk (New York & Evanston: Harper & Brothers, 1927), edited by Countee Cullen.

Gladys May Casely-Hayford (1904-1950), who wrote under the pen name Aquah Laluah, was born in the Gold Coast to a prominent West African family. Her mother, Adelaide Casely-Hayford, was a writer and educator who played a significant role in advancing women’s education, Pan-Africanism, and feminism in Sierra Leone. As a child, Gladys was a voracious reader with a talent for languages. Her health issues took mother and daughter to England, which in turn led to her attending school in Wales. She turned down opportunities to continue her education at Columbia University in the US, opting instead to join a Berlin jazz troupe as a dancer. Gladys’ independent and adventurous nature thwarted her mother’s ambitions for her, but she eventually returned to Sierra Leone to teach at the Girls’ Vocational School founded by Adelaide, where she specialized in African folklore and literature.

Casely-Hayford’s poems, including “The Serving Girl,” were deeply rooted in her milieu, but they have long attracted an international audience. Her work appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Opportunity, and the Messenger in the 1920s, and was included in landmark anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance.

In 2016, the late Sierra Leonean novelist Yema Lucilda Hunter—who was also Casely-Hayford’s daughter-in-law—published An African Treasure, in Search of Gladys Casely-Hayford, 1904-1950. The biography pulls from an unpublished memoir by Adelaide as well as personal correspondence and unpublished writings by Gladys. In the introduction, Hunter quotes an obituary identifying Casely-Hayford as “illustrious lady,” and a British historian who called her “outstanding among Creole literati.” Despite the renown she earned during her lifetime, Hunter explains, Gladys “has hardly been named as a personality of note since Sierra Leone became independent” and, outside of Sierra Leone, is often misidentified as an African American poet. She wrote the biography as a way of capturing Casely-Hayford’s impact for her grandchildren, and to correct the record. Hunter’s book also generously reprints several archival poems.

[Gladys May Casely-Hayford in Harlem Renaissance and Beyond : Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900-1945.]

“Retrato,” Luisa Pérez de Zambrana

No me pintes más blanca ni más bella;
Píntame como soy; trigueña, joven,
Modesta, sin belleza, y si te place,
Puedes vestirme, pero solamente
De muselina blanca, que es el traje
Que a la tranquila sencillez del alma
Y a la escasez de la fortuna mía
Armoniza más bien. Píntame en torno
Un horizonte azul, un lago terso,,
Un sol poniente cuyos rayos tibios 
Acaricien mi frente sosegada.
Los años se hundirán con rauda prisa,
Y cuando ya esté muerta y olvidada
A la sombra de un árbol silencioso, 
Siempre leyendo encontrarás a Luisa.

/

Don't paint me whiter or more lovely; 
paint me like I am; sunbrowned, young, 
modest, without beauty, and if you please, 
put me in clothes, but only 
in white muslin: that's the dress 
that, for the tranquil nature of my soul, 
and the paucity of my fortune, 
suits me best. Paint me, too, 
a blue horizon, a limpid lake, 
a setting sun whose warm rays 
caress my unfurrowed brow. 
The years will pass by quickly, 
and when I'm dead and forgotten 
in the shade of a great silent tree, 
you'll find Luisa — still reading.

Poem circa 1854; Translation by Liz Henry, Toward an Anthology of Spanish-American Women Poets, 1880-1930 (CC BY, 2006).

In The History of Cuba, Willis Fletcher Johnson calls Luisa Pérez de Zambrana (1837-1922) “perhaps the foremost of the women poets of Cuba” and “[o]ne of Cuba’s greatest poets.”1 She engaged with other poetic luminaries of her time, including Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Mercedes Matamoros, and Aurelia Castillo. Her first volume of poetry, Poesías de la señorita Da. Luisa Pérez y Montes de Oca., was published in 1856, and her work appeared in many popular magazines between the 1850s and into the 1910s. Despite its popularity, Pérez de Zambrana’s work, which includes novels and translations from French and Italian, is not widely known or translated today. By 1918, Cuban magazine Social was calling her “ilustre y olvidada” (“illustrious and forgotten”) —a label that holds a sad resonance with the final lines of “Retrato.”

In 1921, Social published a scathing review of a recent publication that claimed to be a complete collection of Pérez de Zambrana’s unpublished and published poetry. The magazine calls out the editor for failing to include a biography of the author, many important poems, dedications and epigraphs, and, crucially, original dates and venues for publication (all the poems included, Social asserts, had in fact been published elsewhere in previous decades). The article outlines how legacies get distorted even while an author is still alive.2 But, in a testament to the poet’s enduring relevance, the magazine waited to publish its criticism until after all copies of the offending collection had been sold. This was because the crowd-funded project was intended to provide financial relief for the elderly poet, who had endured many great losses.

Luckily for readers in English, writer and technologist Liz Henry has made three translations of Pérez de Zambrana’s poems available for free online, as part of the anthology Toward an Anthology of Spanish-American Women Poets, 1880-1930. In their introduction to the translations, Henry draws a parallel between “Retrato” and Sor Juana’s “A su retrato”(1690), noting how both works use the idea of a portrait to explore human impermanence.

Though José Martí, writing in 1875, saw “Retrato” as a collection of “acordes suaves y modestos” by a young poet graciously refusing the glory others wish to bestow upon her, to today’s reader it’s not modesty that the speaker calls for, but authenticity. And, above all, she wishes to be remembered as a reader.

[Liz Henry on Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, with links to translations, via Book Maniac]

“To the Ladies,” by Lady Mary Chudleigh

Wife and Servant are the same,
But only differ in the Name:
For when that fatal Knot is ty'd,
Which nothing, nothing can divide:
When she the word obey has said,
And Man by Law supreme has made,
Then all that's kind is laid aside,
And nothing left but State and Pride:
Fierce as an Eastern Prince he grows,
And all his innate Rigor shows:
Then but to look, to laugh, or speak,
Will the Nuptial Contract break.
Like Mutes she Signs alone must make,
And never any Freedom take:
But still be govern'd by a Nod,
And fear her Husband as her God:
Him still must serve, him still obey,
And nothing act, and nothing say,
But what her haughty Lord thinks fit,
Who with the Pow'r, has all the Wit.
Then shun, oh! shun that wretched State,
And all the fawning Flatt'rers hate:
Value your selves, and Men despise,
You must be proud, if you'll be wise.

From Poems on several occasions. Together with the Song of the three children paraphras’d. By the Lady Chudleigh. (London: Printed by W. B. for Bernard Lintott at the Middle Temple Gate in Fleetstreet, 1703).

Like Luisa Pérez de Zambrana, Lady Mary Chudleigh (1656-1710) was closely associated with a group of prominent creative and intellectual women who are now rarely discussed. Her circle, which included Mary Astell, author of the 1694 manifesto A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (credited to “A Love of Her Sex”), and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose poem “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband” was so subversive it wasn’t published until 1972.

Mary Lee became Lady Chudleigh in 1674 when she married Sir George Chudleigh, 3rd Baronet. They had several children, at least one of whom died young. She began publishing overtly feminist works in 1701 with The Ladies’ Defence, a response to a popular published sermon that called for women’s obedience in marriage. Her first collection of poetry, which included “To the Ladies,” came out in 1703. Mary dedicated it to the then-queen to try and limit backlash. An essay collection followed in 1710, and a volume of her work edited by Margaret J. M. Ezell came out in 1993. Her work also appears in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, edited by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.

In the 1990 anthology Poetry by English Women, Elizabethan to Victorian, editor R.E. Pritchard writes of Lady Mary Chudleigh: “Her verse is very assured and polished, high-minded and judgmental, celebrating female friendships and severe on husbands.” In “To the Ladies,” that last remark feels like an understatement, as her condemnation of marriage and “Men” reads as quite bold even today, well over 300 years after she published it under her own name.

[Lady Mary Chudleigh at The Poetry Foundation]

Further Exploration & News

• This evening, April 30, Cita editorial director Jessi Haley is co-hosting a free Transcribe Harper Pizza Party at The Ruby in San Francisco. Can you imagine a better way to end poetry month than by eating pizza while transcribing poems that changed the world? RSVPs are still open; and anyone can contribute to the larger project remotely.

• On Saturday, May 2, Cita will be exhibiting at the Santa Rosa Zine Fest from 12-5 pm at the Northwest Santa Rosa Library. Free zines and bookmarks, merch, and more!

• Explore Toward an Anthology of Spanish-American Women Poets, 1880-1930, by Liz Henry for more poetry translations and mini biographies.

• José Martí on Luisa Pérez de Zambrana and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, 1875, from Damisela.

• UCLA’s International Digital Ephemera Project, a resource we’ve newly discovered and will certainly be returning to, holds several issues of Social with material by and about Luisa Pérez de Zambrana.

• An annotated transcript of “To the Ladies” by Mary Chudleigh, by students and staff of Marymount University.

• Recorded readings of poems by Gladys May Casely-Hayford on Librivox.

• Previous poetry month Bulletins:

  • “To clear the drifts of spring”: Angelina Weld Grimké, Mina Loy, Anne Spencer, Alfonsina Storni & Sylvia Townsend Warner.

  • “On my volcano grows the grass,—”: Emily Dickinson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Phillis Wheatley Peters, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Fadwa Tuqan.

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On the last day of Women’s History Month, we’re digging into the personal nature[s] of literary recovery. Who preserves and amplifies the voices from the past—and why?

In this issue:

• Exploring the literary recovery of writer, filmmaker, playwright, and activist Kathleen Collins, as stewarded by Nina Lorez Collins, her daughter.

• New to the Cita Canon, three who shaped women’s history:

  • Anna Julia Cooper, a forebear of intersectional feminism;

  • Emma Willard, who invented a new visual language for her theory of history;

  • Gerda Lerner, who established women’s history as a field of study.

• News and upcoming events at the end!

Thank you to Nina Lorez Collins and Ruby Rose Collins for sharing their work and insights with us. We’re grateful for everyone who labors to keep women’s creative work alive our present. If there’s a project you’d like to highlight, write to us at info@citapress.org.

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What is Literary Recovery?

The mainstream canon is historically homogenous, but this isn’t because marginalized people haven’t been producing great literature for a long time. The work itself has existed, and much of it was originally rejected, ignored, or locked away. But obscurity isn’t a permanent condition, even after death. New life comes in the form of literary recovery: the process of bringing unknown or “forgotten” works of literature back into circulation, giving present-day audiences a chance to read and engage with them.

Literature requires minimal tools to be copied, printed, or put online, making its recovery relatively accessible. A rediscovered text can feel like a direct, unmediated transmission from the past: “here is what this person had to say; here is how they said it.” From there others may share, translate, and/or adapt it, further amplifying its reach. Thus literary recovery can forge afterlives, especially for creators whose contributions previously went unrecognized due to race, gender, socioeconomic status, and other overlapping, frustrating factors.

In the foreword to Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Stories by Kathleen Collins, Elizabeth Alexander writes:

The very existence of this book feels to me like an assurance that while we may think we have done our archival work and unearthed all the treasures of black thinking women, there is always something more to find. We have literary foremothers who are not just the ones we know we had, who continue to remind us of ourselves: Our minds are intricate. Our desires are complex. We are gorgeously contradictory in our epistemologies. We were not invented yesterday.

Alexander is discussing the specific lineage of Black women writers, but her argument aligns with the general experience of finding communion with words you didn’t know existed, the “gorgeous contradictions” that previously felt unacknowledged. In these instances one feels joy, recognition, and perhaps even new longing—a sense that even more is out there, just out of reach.

Though literary recovery is inherently collaborative—involving publishers, libraries, scholars, estates—individuals often serve as catalysts. Alice Walker’s search for the resting place of Zora Neale Hurston provides a famous model for how a solo project can transform into a multifaceted resurgence. Often literary recovery starts from an intimate place, with a family member bringing light to a person they loved, and lost.

Nina Lorez Collins was studying abroad in Vienna when her mother, Kathleen, called to share that she had breast cancer. Two weeks later, she was gone. Teenage Nina immediately became her mother’s steward, filling a trunk with manuscripts, screenplays, tapes, notebooks, letters, random scraps of paper. Though she couldn’t face the trunk for decades, when she did start bringing out its treasures she set off a recovery that has been fruitful for over a decade.

Kathleen Collins, by way of Nina Lorez Collins

“Polymath” is an identity most often associated with historical men, the kind immortalized in hundred-year-old statues in public parks. Indeed, on the Wikipedia list of “well-known polymaths,” four of the seventy examples are women.1 But when it comes to defining Kathleen Collins (1942-1988), the title that refers to “an individual whose knowledge spans many different subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge” certainly fits. As a filmmaker, fiction writer, and playwright, Collins made singular, groundbreaking work. As an activist and educator, she influenced the trajectories of students, farmworkers, churchgoers, and beyond.2 Yet the general public had few opportunities to know her until decades after her death at just forty-six years old. Today, at last, we can read her stories, watch her films, stage her plays, and even glimpse into her diary—all thanks to the catalytic work of her daughter.

The first contact Nina’s recovery work made with the public came through Kathleen’s second film, Losing Ground, which she wrote and directed. The story follows Sara Rogers (Seret Scott), a philosophy professor, and members of her immediate circle: her actress mother, Leila (Billie Allen); her artist husband, Victor (Bill Gunn); and Duke, an alluring new acquaintance (Duane Jones).3 As Sara’s research on “the ecstatic moment” evolves across a summer, she grapples with her understanding of marriage, desire, and creative fulfillment.

Losing Ground was one of the first feature-length dramas directed by a Black American woman. Collins pulled it off with a crew made up of mostly students, modest grants, and willpower. She edited the film with her longtime collaborator and former student Ronald K. Gray, who also served as cinematographer. It played festivals, winning first prize at the Figueroa International Film Festival in Portugal in 1982. Despite international praise, Losing Ground had no official release during Collins’s lifetime. After Nina had it restored, however, the film opened the 2015 series Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1988 at the Lincoln Center. Its run was extended due to popular demand, and it has since been released on DVD and streaming.

As a former literary agent, Nina didn’t originally see potential when it came to the other works she’d preserved in the trunk. “I had read my mother’s stories and knew they were good,” she told us, “but I also knew that no one would ever publish them. Literary short stories by a dead, unknown Black woman from the seventies were not something that publishers in say, 1990, or 1995, or 2005 were ever going to take on.” But, after the successful release of Losing Ground, things started to shift. A Public Space editor Brigid Hughes reached out after seeing the film, and “Interiors” became the second of Collins’s stories to be published—ever—in late 2015. From there Nina managed to secure a deal with Ecco Press and the foreword by Alexander, and Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? was finally published in December 2016.

Once the book was in people’s hands, Collins’s words finally had a platform from which to reverberate. Early readers like Zadie Smith, Miranda July, and Margo Jefferson celebrated the discovery of a nearly-lost voice, while also lamenting the earlier obscurity.4 Acclaim opened up further possibilities for Nina to expand the scope of Kathleen’s legacy. “At that point I felt somewhat guilty,” she explained, “because I felt like I had presented a version of my mother to the world that was not quite complete—she was not just an artist who had written one story collection and made one movie. She had done so much more than that…”

In 2019, Ecco published Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary: Selected Works of Kathleen Collins, edited by Nina Lorez Collins. It was the realization of Nina’s idea to share “a complete taste of [Kathleen’s] entire oeuvre.” In the foreword, Danielle Evans describes the author as the “master of the moments when the interior becomes exterior, when all pretense drops away and the unsayable is given words and said out loud.” Indeed the collection exemplifies how her writing establishes an uncompromising channel between the private self and the society in which one operates. It includes three stories, an excerpt from an unfinished novel, diary selections annotated by Kathleen, letters to friends and family, five one-act plays, and two screenplays. Whether she is writing as herself or as a character, to her daughter or for an actor, her distinctive candor comes through. “I don’t write to hide from the world,” she explains in her diary. “If I write because of some illusion, it is not that illusion.”

Today, the contents of Nina’s trunk continue their journey from interior to exterior. Dozens of plays and screenplays, an unfinished novella, and more now live at the Schomberg Library, accessible to researchers. A complete collection of her plays will come out in 2027, and several have been performed across the US in recent years. While grief permeates any discussion of Kathleen Collins’s legacy—given the dearth of recognition while she was alive, the fact that her time was cut so short—more and more people are hearing her voice. Her story reveals the degree to which one determined artist with a determined steward can live forever in our collective culture.

Intergenerational Legacies: Nina Lorez Collins & Ruby Rose Collins

Nina Collins hesitates to draw a strong connection between her mother’s relationship to writing and her own, stating, “I don’t think of myself as a writer the way my mother was a writer. I think she was truly an artist, by which I mean someone who absolutely NEEDS to put pen to paper every single day…” Yet Nina’s voice balances honesty, nuance, and wide-ranging curiosity in a way that recalls her predecessor. She has written movingly about her family history and the process of tending to a layered legacy. She is also the author of What Would Virginia Woolf Do? And Other Questions I Ask Myself as I Attempt to Age Without Apology—a book inspired by an online community she founded around the same time she began shaping her mother’s resurgence. It draws from her own experiences and those of her fellow “Woolfers,” with wisdom from literary feminists like Doris Lessing, Stevie Smith, Nora Ephron and Virginia Woolf herself.

Meanwhile, Nina’s daughter has also built a creative career that corresponds with her heritage. A director and producer who has worked for ABC News, A&E, and CNN, Ruby Rose Collins has made two independent shorts: My Abortion Saved My Life (2022), a documentary about the experiences of Black trans activist Cazembe Murphy Jackson (he/him), and all the love i could handle, a narrative.

Last year all the love i could handle debuted at the New Black Film Collective in London before traveling to festivals like Blackstar (Philadelphia), the American Black Film Festival (Miami), the Chicago International Film Festival, and Hollyshorts (Los Angeles). The film reimagines the day that Kathleen Collins finished making Losing Ground from the eyes of her two young children. Drawing from her mother’s memories and her grandmother’s art, Ruby created her own work—one that “lingers in the quiet spaces between devotion and distance, presence and absence.”

That lingering in the in-between seems to flow across generations in the Collins family, alongside pursuit of slippery truths. Reflecting on making all the love, Ruby says: “I was surprised by how much longing the process left me with. Longing to know my mother as a young girl, longing to keep trying to bring memory back to life. What feels both beautiful and painful is that there will never be a single true version of Kathleen, or of my mother’s childhood. There is only memory, reshaped memory, and the individual interpretations we make from it.”

Ruby continues to interrogate memory through her projects. She is currently developing her first feature, WANT ME, based on her own childhood and mother-daughter dynamic. She is also co-producer on the second season of Netflix’s Forever, a loose adaptation of Judy Blume’s beloved, controversial 1975 novel. The series, created by Mara Brock Akil, brings the book’s insights about first love and budding sexuality into this century while adapting the characters’ experiences to reflect Black life in the US.

Over the past half-century, three generations of Collins women have used language to explore who we remember, how we remember them, and how we understand ourselves in relation to each other. “As my mentor [Brock Akil] says, we are all striving to tell the truth” Ruby explains. “That’s the most powerful thing we can do with our pen. I feel deeply honored to explore that in my own personal work while also contributing to the vision of one of the most truthful storytellers of our time.” Through its intimate constellation, the Collinses’ collective work has plenty to teach us about our connection to the past. Perhaps we are all inheritors of the legacies of feminist trailblazers; maybe we share the responsibility of keeping their ideas and stories not just alive, but active—of creating sites for reimagining, debate, and inspiration. Perhaps literary recovery depends on, and generates, something like love.

all the love i could handle takes its name from a letter from Kathleen to seventeen-year-old Nina, which is included in Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary. Collins writes:

“Often while I was raising you alone, when I would look at both of you—and this refers again to your remark about strength—I was positive that both of you had just that: strength. I think in your case I counted on it early and because it was only my strength that was holding me together, I blindly ignored what a crippling, empty thing strength is without vulnerability, softness, giving into love. I couldn’t possibly allow myself to love you children except by being a good caretaker and a good provider. I, literally, put my love into that and kept my heart closed. It was all the love I could handle, all the love I could provide.

At the end of the letter, following a meditation on intergenerational pain, Collins concludes:

Now when I experience myself it is as if the center of me had light constantly cascading through it. I draw those I love close to me simply by breathing and when I breathe fully those I love—you, Emilio, Alfred—pass through me full of light. We bless each other. We ask and receive forgiveness. We go on with our separate lives but they are changed, shaped, sustained, supported by this love that is as light and free as fine-spun gold…

Further exploration

• Follow Kathleen Collins’s ongoing recovery via her website, maintained by Nina Lorez Collins.

• all the love i could handle will be screened at several film schools this summer, including UCLA, and other chances to see the film are in the works. Stay updated via @alltheloveicouldhandle on Instagram.

• Ruby Rose Collins is fundraising for her next short: squatter, a dark comedy about a nineteen-year-old whose attempt to protect her mother from domestic violence sets off a chain of events that veers into the grotesque, the liberating, and the unexpectedly funny.

• Learn more about Nina Lorez Collins’s work, which focuses on narrative medicine, community building, and the emotional lives of women over forty.

• “…to have a project come full circle from a writer who helped me understand who I am is just — I’m really grateful for that.” Mara Brock Akil on reinventing Judy Blume’s Forever, via Indiewire.

• “I am not interested in mythology. I am interested in ideas.” Watch a recording of a Howard University class with Kathleen Collins from 1984.

• On “knowing of each others’ existence,” from the June 2025 Cita Press Bulletin.

Cita Canon

Emma Willard (1787-1870) founded the Troy Female Seminary, the first school focused on higher education for women in the United States. She believed in giving girls the same learning opportunities as boys, challenging the view that girls were only fit for subjects centering “the charms of youth and beauty." In A Plan for Improving Female Education, which she presented to the New York Legislature in 1819, she asserted: “Another errour is, that it has been made the first object in educating our sex, to prepare them to please the other.”

Willard authored of several history and geography textbooks. Though she viewed American history through a nationalistic lens that feels quite retrograde today, her communication methods were innovative on a visual level. Her approach to cartography was introduced in A System of Universal Geography on the Principles of Comparison and Classification, the first mainstream historical atlas in the U.S. With experimental maps that draw a graphic connection between ancient and modern times, Willard managed to simultaneously emphasize and collapse the expanse of time. Describing her “Temple of Time,” Susan Schulten writes: “The design is complex and unwieldy, but the goal is intriguing: an interactive exercise for students to integrate history and geography in order to understand how the past had—quite literally—taken place.” In Willard’s words: “At a time when the accumulated mass of knowledge is great, beyond the human capacity, service is done to science, by clear arrangement and devices addressed to the eye.”

[“Emma Willard’s Maps of Time” by Susan Schulten for Public Domain Review]

As an activist, educator, public intellectual, and writer, Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) spent decades advocating for race and gender equality, earning her the moniker of “the mother of Black feminism.”

Born into slavery, by age nine Cooper was a star student at St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute. There she petitioned for permission to take classes—like Greek and Latin—outside of the “Ladies’ Course.” Her pattern of breaking down gendered educational barriers continued at Oberlin, where she earned a B.A. and an M.A. in mathematics. Later, in her sixties, she became the fourth African American woman to earn a PhD when she graduated from the Sorbonne. She worked on her dissertation, “L‘Attitude De La France A L ‘Egard De L‘Esclavage Pendant La Revolution” (“The Attitude of France Toward Slavery During the Revolution”), while also teaching full time. At seventy-two, she became president of Frelinghuysen University.

Dr. Cooper’s writings complemented her teaching and activism, articulating ideas about history, identity, and social change that influenced thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois. Her book A Voice from the South is considered one of the first Black feminist texts. It argues that equal access to education and opportunity for Black women will help all African Americans, and, by extension, all of society. The text highlights other Black women who accomplished great feats despite overwhelming obstacles, including activist Sojourner Truth, poet Phillis Wheatley Peters, and sculptor Edmonia Lewis. A quote from A Voice from the South now appears in the pages of the U.S. Passport: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”

[Anna Julia Cooper at the Black Women’s Organizing Archive; “A Voice from the South: Dr. Anna Julia Cooper” by Jennifer Davis, Library of Congress Blogs]

Gerda Lerner (1920-2013) is known as the “godmother of women’s history.” Arriving in the US in 1939 after fleeing Austria, she worked a range of jobs while also writing poetry and fiction and participating in political activism. While an undergrad at the New School, she taught what is considered the first regular college course on women’s history. She then established the Master of Arts Program in Women’s History at Sarah Lawrence and the first PhD program in women’s history at the University of Madison, Wisconsin.

In addition to writing seminal books like The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to 1870 (1993), she edited the landmark anthologies Black Women in White America (1973) and The Female Experience (1976). In 1979, Lerner chaired The Women’s History Institute at Sarah Lawrence, where, inspired by successful organizing in Sonoma County, CA, participants decided to advocate for a “National Women’s History Week.” Their efforts led to President Jimmy Carter issuing a Presidential Proclamation declaring the week of March 8th, 1980 as National Women’s History Week. Eventually, Women’s History Month became an [inter]national reality.

[“Gerda Lerner (1920–2013). Pioneering Historian and Feminist” by Linda Gordon, Linda K. Kerber and Alice Kessler-Harris, from Clio (38, 2013)]

What Else?

• Earlier this month, we held a “Transcribe Harper Pizza Party” at the Sitting Room Library. On April 30, we’re doing it again at The Ruby in San Francisco, in partnership with Christie George and . Prepare for some “SWT, or smiling while typing,” as Christie put it. Details coming soon; write to info@citapress.org with questions in the meantime.

• April 15 is the deadline to submit to ’s 2026 Anthology: Who is She? Remarkable Women You Want to Know. A perfect way to get started on a recovery project of one’s own!

• On May 2, we’ll be at the Santa Rosa Zine Fest!

• For more women’s history, read our free book: On the Equality of the Sexes by Judith Sargent Murray (1790)—the first published call for gender equality in the US. Foreword by Bonnie Hurd Smith and cover by Natalia Rojas.

• More links from our research; track the Cita Canon.

• The next Cita Press title is coming later this spring! Please share this newsletter with anyone who might be interested in diving into a new translation of an essential Latin American feminist text…

February came and went in a flash, and we at Cita Press find ourselves back in your inbox with more messages from history that feel quite urgent in the context of our turbulent present. When it comes to the voices from the past, celebrating and listening go hand in hand, perhaps especially during Black History Month. In this Bulletin, we’re spending time with legendary writer and activist Frances E.W. Harper and the projects that are bringing her back into mass public consciousness. Harper joins her colleague Mary Ann Shadd Cary in the Cita Canon alongside quilt maker Harriet Powers. We’ll also share some ways you can amplify Harpers’s voice, online and in your own living room.

We’re grateful to Eunice Toh, Brandi Locke, and everyone else at Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk—and their collaborators all over the world—for inviting all of us to join in their essential, illuminating work.

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A Brief Intro to Frances E.W. Harper

On September 25, 1825, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born free in a slave state. Baltimore, Maryland was home to the largest population of free Black people in the United States; it was also a center for human trafficking. This juxtaposition shaped Harper’s early life, and she grew up to be one of the most influential Black women writers and activists in history. Orphaned at age three, she was raised by her aunt and uncle, Henrietta and Reverend William J. Watkins, Sr., in a community of abolitionists. Though she left school at thirteen to work as a seamstress, she continued her education in the bookshop owned by her white Quaker employers, reading and writing whenever she had the chance. By her mid-teens, she was publishing work in anti-slavery magazines. Forest Leaves, her first poetry book and a nearly-lost classic of abolitionist literature, came out in 1850—the same year as the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act.1 It was followed by the immensely popular Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects in 1854.

Over the next six decades, Harper forged a path marked by countless achievements in her overlapping capacities as author, educator, organizer, and orator. As an activist, she co-founded organizations, built coalitions, and took on personal acts of resistance like refusing to give up her seat on a segregated trolley car (nearly a century before Rosa Parks’ action). As a writer, she was prolific, bold, and widely read. Her literary milestones include:

• The poem “Bury Me in a Free Land,” a touchstone of abolitionist literature (in The Anti-Slavery Bugle, 1858)

• “The Two Offers”, the first short story published by a Black woman (in the Anglo-African, 1859)

• The speech “We Are All Bound Up Together,” delivered at the National Women’s Rights Convention in New York City (1866)

• Three serialized novellas—Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, and Trial and Triumph—engaged with suffrage, temperance, education, and racism (in the Christian Recorder, 1869-1889)

• Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, one of the first published novels by an African American woman (1892)

Frances E. W. Harper’s legacy has, as the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk puts it, “been foundational for Black women writers and organizers alike.” Her name should still be known in every household. Teams at #DigBlk, together with a robust network of partners, have been working to make that a reality with wide-ranging initiatives including events, a digital exhibit, public art, and more, united under the umbrella of #Harper200.

A Conversation with Eunice Toh on Transcribe Harper

On the two-hundredth anniversary of Harper’s birth in September 2025, #DigBlk capped off #Harper200 by launching an ongoing program that anyone, anywhere can participate in: Transcribe Harper.

Transcribe Harper invites everyone to contribute to the larger project of preserving Harper’s legacy by taking on the small, meaningful task of typing up scanned documents, one by one. The project uses the research platform Zooniverse to make the process clear, quick, and effective. Eventually, these individual transcriptions will be part of a searchable digital repository open to all.

We spoke to Eunice Toh, a Research Associate at the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk, about the purpose and outcomes of the project. Dr. Toh leads Transcribe Harper and is part of the team organizing all of #DigBlk’s transcription projects. She has a PhD in English and African American and Diaspora Studies from Penn State, and her scholarship considers how the entanglements of race, ecology, and the planet invite alternate understandings of cultural projects like the Renaissance (both as literary period and ideological concept). Here Eunice generously shares her insights, expertise, and encouragement with us.

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1. The launch of Transcribe Harper caps off a year of programming to celebrate 200 years since Frances E.W. Harper’s birth. How do you see this work building on other #Harper200 events and initiatives?

Our #Harper200 celebrations included a whole slate of scholarly and arts programming to commemorate the incredible life and legacy of Frances E. W. Harper. We hope that Transcribe Harper, which features her poetry and prose among other writings, will bring her work to a larger audience. The centerpiece of our collection is an edited volume of Harper’s writings created by Dr. Frances Smith Foster titled A Brighter Coming Day.2 This transcription project will make A Brighter Coming Day and various related archival materials fully searchable and free. As A Brighter Coming Day is out of print, we see this transcription project as an opportunity to honor Dr. Foster by making her edited volume accessible to future scholars of Harper Studies.

2. The Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk has organized a number of transcription projects in recent years, bringing together scholars and students, librarians, educators, and members of the public. What is it about transcription that makes this kind of collaboration work well?

While it’s possible to use OCR or other digital technologies to convert archival documents into readable text, we miss out on the opportunity to get multiple groups of people involved in the preservation and research of Black history. In this sense, crowdsourced transcriptions are a great vehicle for demonstrating the importance of grassroots community engagement.

3. CBDR/#DigBlk hosts a global transcribe-a-thon each year for Douglass Day. Recent years have focused on Black women who used writing and literature to change the world, like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Mary Church Terrell. How has that work fed into other projects, like the Black Women’s Organizing Archive, digital exhibits, etc.?

Our transcription projects are part of a multi-pronged approach to digital collection building. It starts off with our research and development team, who spend time in the physical and digital archives looking for materials. We combine their efforts with those of our community partnerships, whether it involves mural arts or teaching and curriculum or digital exhibits. We like to think of our different projects as existing in the greater ecosystem of broadening access to Black history. The more avenues for outreach, the better!

4. How does hosting these transcription projects on Zooniverse make it easier to get more people involved? In brief, what happens after people contribute to a transcription project on Zooniverse?

Each page or document on Zooniverse is transcribed by a few people to ensure we get the most accurate version possible. After a transcription project is completed, our team enters the post-processing phase. This phase involves looking over the transcriptions, comparing the different versions, and making editorial and interpretive decisions on how best to present the information. For each Black woman writer like Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Frances E. W. Harper, we create an open access website where the materials are organized according to genre, chronology, etc. For any transcriptions on the site, we make sure to include attribution language honoring the tremendous effort undertaken by transcribers. Here’s an example, from our Colored Conventions Project:

This transcription is the combination of work from more than 4,500 people who volunteered during the 2022 celebration of Douglass Day, held in partnership with Zooniverse.

5. What is something surprising you’ve learned in your work organizing these transcription projects? Or something you’d like people to know that may not be apparent to people thinking about getting involved?

A simple and unlikely joy I’ve found in this work is moderating the talk boards on our Zooniverse page. It’s so exciting to see the number of people who share a note on what they’ve transcribed, whether it’s about a personal connection to the text or how the content serves as an interlocutor to contemporary times. Anyone can transcribe and whether you work on one page or multiple, you become part of a collective that is working to preserve and amplify Black history.

6. Anything upcoming to plug?

We have close to 500 pages of Harper’s materials to transcribe and we appreciate your help in making her beautiful and relevant writings more well-known!

—

Many thanks to Eunice! To reiterate: Transcribe Harper is something we can all get involved in, on our own time and from our own homes. Bay Area folks: see below and follow Cita Press on Instagram and here Substack to learn about upcoming opportunities for communal transcription. We encourage anyone to adapt this model, too (feel free to email us with questions). We can do this alone and we can this alone together.

Further Exploration

• On Tuesday, March 24, Cita editorial director will be cohosting a Transcribe Harper [Pizza] Party at the Sitting Room Library in Penngrove, CA. Details here. More Bay Area transcription parties are forthcoming.

• Read Harper: Selected Readings of Frances E. W. Harper: #Harper200 Commemorative Booklet via The Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk.

• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper at 200 (digital exhibit).

• Frances E.W. Harper at the Black Women’s Organizing Archive .

• Choreography sketches for The Artistry and Activism of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper from Sharing Our Legacy Dance Theatre.

• Watch the dance performances from the 2025 “Frances E.W. Harper 200: Looking Back, Moving Forward” symposium.

• Frances E. W. Harper: We Are All Bound Up Together: mural by Athena Scott for Mural Arts Philadelphia.

• A Zine for the People: Celebrating Community, Voice and Freedom in honor of Frances E. W. Harper: created by the Greene Street Friends School Class of 2027, inspired by a poetry workshop with Ursula Rucker.

• “Frances Harper — Iola Leroy with Dr. Koritha Mitchell” via .

Cita Canon Spotlight

#DigBlk projects highlight how the women who shaped nineteenth-century Black history did so in community, creating networks of action and amplification. This is the spirit we hope to move with in building our cross-generational, cross-disciplinary canon. The February 2026 Cita Canon inductees include two contemporaries of Frances E.W. Harper (and Harper herself, covered above).

Harriet Powers (1937-1910), like Harper, told stories that wove together history, spirituality, African American traditions, and the natural world—only her medium was quilting. Born into slavery near Athens, Georgia, is believed that, while in captivity, she spun cotton for her enslaver, making her intimately familiar with the creation of the materials that she would later turn into “story quilts.” In 1886, Powers exhibited her work The Bible Quilt at the Athens Cotton Fair, where it attracted the attention of Jennie Smith. Smith offered to buy it, but “it was not for sale at any price.” Facing hard times a few years later, Powers did sell the quilt to Smith, who recorded the artist’s detailed explanation of its various scenes in her diary (with her own editorializing). The Bible Quilt, currently in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and The Pictorial Quilt (1898), currently in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, are the only two known surviving quilts by Powers. Her letters and other documents reference others she created, and, in the photograph we have of her, she wears an apron adorned with motifs found in her work. Though many of Harriet Powers’ artworks are lost to us, the two we can access are deeply layered with meaning. They depict struggles, triumphs, stories from the Bible and real events like the Leonid Meteor Shower in 1833.

Though Powers achieved renown in her lifetime, details about her life and death fell out of public knowledge until recent decades, with more of the picture coming into focus as recognition of her artistic legacy grows. In 2005, University of Georgia graduate student Cat Holmes found the gravestone belonging to Harriet and her husband, Armstead, and a new grave monument was dedicated by the Women of Color Quilters Network in 2023. In 2022, The Bible Quilt and The Pictorial Quilt were exhibited together for the first time in the MFA show Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories. And the United States Postal Service has launched new stamps featuring sections of Pictoral Quilt—available tomorrow. [“Harriet Powers, American Artist and Quilter” by Raiana Kelly for the Fiber Arts Collective of Athens]

Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893) was a journalist, editor, organizer, and lawyer who achieved many pioneering feats in North America. She was the first Black woman to publish a newspaper, the first woman publisher in Canada, and the second woman to attend law school in the U.S. She was born free in Delaware to a family of activists. The Shadds often sheltered people via the Underground Railroad and were deeply involved in the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Colored Conventions (political gatherings organized around achieving racial justice). The family moved to Pennsylvania in response to laws in Delaware that made educating Black children illegal. They moved again after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, this time to Canada. Mary Ann Shadd became an advocate for emigration to Canada, authoring the pamphlet A Plea for Emigration; Or Notes of Canada West in 1852. Her newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, centered the stories of Black Canadian emigrants and anti-slavery activists. She faced much criticism for becoming a woman publisher and for criticizing the lack of gender equality displayed at the Conventions, to which she served as delegate in 1855, before women were allowed to play that role.

After the Civil War, Shadd Cary moved back the U.S. and continued her activism, including around women’s suffrage. She found the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise in 1880 and graduated from Howard University School of Law in 1883, at age sixty. In addition to various public commemorations in the U.S. and Canada, Shadd Cary appears alongside fellow abolitionists Harriet Forten Purvis, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Charlotte Forten Grimke in the recently unveiled mural Frances E. W. Harper: We Are All Bound Up Together, which visually links a community of women activists. [“Mary Ann Shadd Cary” at the Black Women’s Organizing Archive]

From “The Present Age” by Frances E. W. Harper (1895)

Say not the age is hard and cold—
I think it brave and grand;
When men of diverse sects and creeds
Are clasping hand in hand.

…

A battle greater, grander far
Is for the present age;
A crusade for the rights of man
To brighten history's page.

Where labor faints and bows her head,
And want consorts with crime;
Or men grown faithless sadly say
That evil is the time.

There is the field, the vantage ground
For every earnest heart;
To side with justice, truth and right
And act a noble part.

To save from ignorance and vice
The poorest, humblest child;
To make our age the fairest one
On which the sun has smiled;

To plant the roots of coming years
In mercy, love and truth;
And bid our weary, saddened earth
Again renew her youth.

Oh! earnest hearts! toil on in hope,
'Till darkness shrinks from light;
To fill the earth with peace and joy,
Let youth and age unite;

…

Full text: Atlanta Offering : Poems. In the digital collection American Verse Project. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.

Stars over snow,
     And in the west a planet 
Swinging below a star—
     Look for a lovely thing and you will find it, 
It is not far—
      It never will be far.

—“Night” by Sara Teasdale. From Stars To-night (1930); new to the public domain in 2026.

Every January 1 is Public Domain Day, when thousands of creative works come out of copyright and “ascend” into public ownership. Since 2022, Cita Press has celebrated by creating our own lists of things new to the public domain, focused on works by women writers and artists. While we overlap with roundups compiled by other organizations, broader lists tend to have a gender imbalance. This is due not just to what is most recognizable to mainstream audiences, but also to what information is actually out there.

As our team’s understanding of how copyright works has deepened over the years, we’ve learned a lot about the factors impacting what is visible in the vast landscape of the public domain. The Bulletin gives us space to share some of that knowledge and, in small ways, expand that visibility. The structural issues that have made it hard for women to create—and to be recognized for their work—haunt the process of tending their legacies. The records of women’s achievements are often lost, buried, obscured. As we examine how this manifests in the realm of copyright, we hope to also spotlight some of the writers and artists for whom there exist relatively scant records.

This month we’re looking at the complications involved in figuring out which works of visual art are new to the public domain, specifically in the United States. This is inspired by commentary in the Center for the Study of the Public Domain’s annual roundup that corresponds to Cita design coordinator Mariana Matos’ experience trying to find works by women artists for our US-based list. We dig into three examples: one work that was included in various Public Domain Day lists (including Cita’s) and two that weren’t. Please note that the Cita Press Bulletin does not intend to provide legal advice.

Endless thanks to Jason Rosenberg of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School for contributing to this issue, and to Jennifer Jenkins for putting us in touch.

Read to the end for book-related initiatives in Minneapolis and beyond, upcoming events and opportunities, and more.

Entering the Public Domain

Books, films, music compositions, paintings, comics—if a creative work makes its way from a person’s imagination to some kind of tangible form it has a copyright period. Once that period ends the work becomes owned by the public, making it free for anyone to copy, share, adapt, and remix into something new.

In the US, works from before 1977 typically enter the public domain ninety-five years after publication. Most things that came out of copyright on January 1, 2026 were published in 1930. There are exceptions to this, but the standard trajectory for a book looks like this:

• March 1930: Edna Ferber’s Cimarron is registered for copyright

• April 1930: Cimarron is published (it becomes the bestselling novel of 1930)

• March 1957: The copyright for Cimarron is registered for renewal

• January 1, 2026: Cimarron enters the public domain

For visual art, the path is less legible. The date you see associated with a work of art on a museum wall or website corresponds to the year the piece was created, not the year it was “published,” or made available to people outside a private sphere. While some museum websites include details like known exhibition history, it is often hard to find this information as a regular person on the internet. Things get even murkier when taking artists’ nationality into consideration, as works are subject to a different set of requirements depending on where they were created.

Thus there are several reasons why accounts of visual artworks new to the public domain are often brief and include mostly famous artists. The convoluted situation also imposes challenges on institutions when it comes to updating copyright labels in their digital repositories. Ultimately, this means we’re all missing out on access to a lot of works, especially those created by artists with marginalized identities.

Detective Work in the Public Domain

Cita’s Public Domain Day research involves combing through various Wikipedia lists (e.g. “1930 in literature“), playing with filters in open access collections, and anything else we can think of to help find hidden treasures. From there, we have learned from past mistakes that there are extra steps required for verification, such as checking copyright renewal records for books. We refine our approach each year, but do not yet have a smooth process or one that comes close to capturing the depth and breadth of women artists in the public domain’s “class of 2026.” And we’re not alone.

In describing the special challenges involved in verifying visual art as new to the public domain, Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle note that Center for the Study of the Public Domain research assistant Jason Rosenberg “spent months contacting experts and combing through exhibition catalogues, museum archives, journals, catalogues raisonnés, provenance indexes, auction records, and biographies to confirm whether [works] were published in 1930.”

Rosenberg generously agreed to share more about that process with us. He started from scratch, combing through books, exhibition catalogues, articles and more to compile a list of artworks dated 1930. In doing so he applied both his deep knowledge in art history and his “personal philosophical approach,” selecting works that had general interest beyond specific niches. “Since this is our collective, shared visual culture,” he explains, “I think it’s only right that everyone should be able to understand and enjoy its significance.” He collaborated with Jenkins, Director of the Center, to narrow the scope from there— “both legally and aesthetically”.

The absence of copyright renewal firmly eliminated some of Rosenberg’s candidates; others were left out due to a lack of information that could confirm whether they were in fact newly out of copyright (or out of copyright at all).1 On Cita’s end, we also examined a number of pieces from 1930 that didn’t make our final list. This was because we were able to disqualify them as “published” in 1930 or because we couldn’t make a call in either direction. Ultimately, for Duke and for Cita, “the final selections emerged through a combination of legal verification and curatorial judgment.” Let’s explore what this looks like in practice…

Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Composition of Circles and Overlapping Angles

Composition of Circles and Overlapping Angles is the only piece of visual art by a woman we found in any of the other US-specific “new to the public domain” lists. The painting is an important work by an artist who helped shape the direction of Abstract art internationally. Created in the same year that Taeuber-Arp joined the Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) movement, Composition reflects Constructivist approaches to color, spatial composition, and texture.

Here is Jason Rosenberg’s account of verifying Composition as new to the public domain in 2026:

The process began by compiling a preliminary list of artworks dated to 1930 that I believed would be of interest to the general public. From there, each work had to be evaluated under U.S. copyright law as it existed in 1930, which required confirming not just the year of the work’s creation, but also whether the work had been “published” in 1930 (”published” is a legal term of art here that essentially means it was publicly shown in 1930 and not just sitting in the artist’s studio) and the nationality of the artist in question. Most often, proof that a work was “published” came from exhibition records or newspaper articles published in 1930, since these were definitive historical proof that the work in question was in the public consciousness/distributed publicly at the time.

In the case of Taeuber-Arp’s work, the confirmation process was relatively straightforward: while I was researching Piet Mondrian, I happened to discover that Taeuber-Arp had exhibited Composition of Circles and Overlapping Angles at the same exhibition in which Mondrian showed Composition No. II/Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow (the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930).2 My undergraduate/graduate art history professor, Professor Bibiana Obler,3 had published scholarly literature on Taeuber-Arp in the past, so I was already familiar with her and her husband’s art, and knew the significance of their work to the development of abstract art. Because Taeuber-Arp’s Composition was dated to 1930 and there was concrete evidence that it was “published” (publicly exhibited) that year, it therefore met the criteria for entering the public domain in 2026. I then confirmed this conclusion by consulting the work’s exhibition history, which corroborated that the painting was exhibited at the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930.

Frances Hodgkins’ Flatford Mill

In Cita’s research, Wikimedia Commons and the Tate Museum website were the most useful when it came to drawing conclusions around whether or not a work is new to the public domain in 2026. Tate very helpfully includes catalogue information for each piece in its online collection. This makes an enormous difference when it comes confirming copyright status, and it also gives a sense of the lifecycle of work over time. Users aren’t just informed about when a work was created, but also about when and how it has been made available to the public for viewing—telling data when it comes to tracing the position of women artists across art history.

For this work by New Zealand artist Frances Hodgkins, the Tate catalogue entry suggests, but does not confirm, that the painting was included in a 1930 exhibition:

Frances Hodgkins stayed at Flatford Mill, in the Constable country, from the end of June to November 1930, painting and preparing for her exhibition to be held at the St George’s Gallery that autumn. One of the pictures in that exhibition was entitled ‘Flatford Weir’, but she painted a number of pictures of Flatford Mill, Willy Lott’s Cottage and other subjects in the neighbourhood. A picture of Flatford Mill is in the Collection of Mrs Wertheim, bought from the St George’s Gallery in 1930.

Two photographs of her at Flatford Mill, in one of which she is seen looking at this picture, were published in The Sphere, 27 September 1930.

We found the relevant issue of The Sphere, but the photo doesn't identify or focus on that painting, and we couldn’t verify that it was otherwise publicly viewable that year. So we left Flatford Mill out of our roundup—but not without some echoes of “probably? maybe?” bounding off the surface of Hodgkins’ vibrantly-rendered millpond.

Karimeh Abbud’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Palestinian photographer Karimeh Abbud ran her own studio, signed her photographs, and exhibited frequently. Though interest in her work was renewed in the early 2000s following the discovery of hundred of photographs, the publicly available information in English points to many unknowns about her life. This limits what we understand about her works’ provenance, and, by association, their copyright status.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre is one of three photographs by Abbud that Falak Archive attributes to the year 1930; each demonstrates her facility in capturing the specific character of cities through her landscape work. In the time we had, we weren’t able to verify the 1930 creation date (the same photo appears elsewhere without firm dates), nor were we able to find concrete evidence that the photo was exhibited or otherwise “published” during that year.

This exemplifies a frequent issue that comes up when investigating the copyright status for lesser-known artists, especially those from outside of Europe or North America. While it’s possible that Church of the Holy Sepulchre and other photos by Abbud are in the public domain in the US, we can’t say for sure. Abbud’s work, and that of many others, deserves more visibility—but the process of facilitating that visibility remains fraught.

More Candidates, In Brief

In the hours spent hunting down works that we could confidently call “new to the public domain,” we came across a range of compelling candidates. Here are a few more we couldn’t include in our roundup, with brief explanations as to why:

1. Eldslågor (Flames) by Hilma af Klint

   1. Perhaps not publicly viewable before a 1988 auction.

2. Three Symbols by Eileen Agar

   1. Earliest available mention of gallery exhibition is 1964.

3. Soap Suds by Ringo + Pit (Grete Stern & Ellen Auerbach)

   1. Other sites date this photo at 1931; some works by Ringl + Pit seem to have been “published” in 1931.

4. Marseille by Germaine Krull

   1. Published in a book in 1931 (so perhaps new to the public domain in 2027).

5. Roceiras by Georgina de Albuquerque

   1. No details available on sites we found.

6. Composição (Figura só) / Composition (Lonely Figure) by Tarsila do Amaral

   1. There’s a fair amount of analysis on this painting online, as well information about the context of its creation. We didn’t find information on its exhibition history, however.

7. Self Portrait 9 by Amrita Sher-Gil

   1. One of the artist’s self-portraits was exhibited at her 1937 show in Lahore. This is likely in the public domain in India but not in the US; see the note on another self portrait from the series from Wikimedia.

8. 14 Juillet (14th of July) by Marguerite Nakhla

   1. We couldn’t find more details on this work; the Wikipedia page for the artist has an “exhibition” section with the earliest at 1931, but no sources cited.

Lost & Found in Cultural Heritage

After a century of dramatic extensions to copyright terms across the world, copyright—a legal framework originally meant to protect creators—now functions as something else entirely. Cultural institutions often face direct challenges (legally justified or not) to opening up their collections and inviting people to use them freely. In the meantime, without explicit paths for stewardship and legal use, many “living things” creators left behind risk getting lost. As we connect with others working in the open culture space, it becomes clear that everyone with an interest in preserving culture has to navigate the risk of getting something wrong. “There are assuredly countless other works by women that we could have highlighted this year,” Jason Rosenberg told us. “I’d like to share more works [from my research], but I don’t want to mistakenly give you any incorrect information.”

Nevertheless, each Public Domain Day brings us a little closer to finding ways to connect the “countless women” of the past to our present, without sharing misinformation in the process. We’re grateful for the efforts of folks at the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, the Internet Archive, Wikimedia, The Public Domain Review, Creative Commons, and other organizations that share a commitment to connecting all of us to our cultural heritage.

To give Jason the last word on the subject:

As Justice Elena Kagan said in her dissenting opinion in Warhol v. Goldsmith: “[A]rtists don’t create all on their own; they cannot do what they do without borrowing from or otherwise making use of the work of others.” Letting current and future artists know about the works that are free for them to use in the public domain to build off of, remix, and transform without threat of legal action is such important news to highlight.

Further Exploration

• Cita Press 2026 “New to the Public Domain” lists (collected off Instagram here):

  • Literature: in the US; around the world; children’s literature (US)

  • Visual Art: in the US; around the world

  • Film: women writers & film

• Previous Public Domain Day Bulletin issues:

  • “...let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”: On the enduring, essential power of A Room of One’s Own; the women who shaped Woolf; “repairing” the past via the public domain?

  • “...in my day I was a Pioneer and a Menace,”: Untangling the public domain via Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and Miki Hayakawa.

• Other “New to the Public Domain” roundups:

  • Center for the Study of the Public Domain

  • Internet Archive

  • The Public Domain Review

  • Standard Ebooks

• See recordings of last week’s Public Domain Day celebrations (virtual and in-person) at the Internet Archive.

• There are many public domain works stewarded by cultural institutions that remain inaccessible to most people. Sometimes this is a logistical issue; sometimes it is more complicated than that. Last fall, Cita signed the Open Heritage Statement, which calls on organizations to “affirm shared values, identify barriers to access, and champion the power of open heritage to spark creativity, strengthen cultural rights, and support sustainable futures.” Individuals can follow along and show support.

• “The Public Domain Manifesto aims at reminding citizens and policy-makers of a common wealth that, since it belongs to all, it is often defended by no-one.”

• CommonsDB is an initiative funded by the European Commission to develop and test a prototype registry of public domain and openly licensed works.

Cita Canon Spotlight

Karimeh Abbud (1896-~1940) was one of the first women photographers in the Middle East. She set up a thriving business in wedding, portrait, and landscape photography, and traveled extensively to capture people and places as, according to her advertisements, the “only national woman photographer in Palestine.” She signed prints of her photographs with “Karimeh Abbud - Lady Photographer - كريمة عبود: مصورة شمس”. She took many portraits of women, and scholars have noted that her subjects otherwise may not have been comfortable sitting for a photograph. [“Early Local Photography in Palestine: The Legacy of Karimeh Abbud” by Issam Nassar, Institute for Palestine Studies; “Karimeh Abbud” at AWARE]

Considered one of the most influential artists from New Zealand, Frances Hodgkins (1869-1957) was a key figure in British Modernism. She collaborated with and taught a number of women artists, among them Barbara Hepworth, Emily Carr, Dolla Richmond, and Margaret Butler. In 1948, Hodgkins was the only woman artist to be a subject in a book from the Penguin Modern Painter series (the author, Myfanwy Evans, was the only woman writer to contribute, too). [FrancesHodgkins.com by Jonathan Goodman]

Switzerland-born artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) rejected the distinction between fine art and other creative practices. She used many mediums, and her abstract paintings and drawings often served as a design basis for textiles, jewelry, costumes, and other forms that her contemporaries might have considered less serious. She even branched into interior design and architecture, working with her husband, Hans (Jean) Arp, and Dutch artist Theo van Doesberg to redesign a wing of the Aubette building in Strasbourg, France to create an avant-garde entertainment complex. She was one of few women in the dada group. [Five Things to Know About Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Tate]

What Else?

• Read about how Minnesota librarians are supporting their communities. One school librarian interviewed notes that letters of encouragement from outside the area are much appreciated.

• I’m Your Neighbor Books is sending free, carefully selected books to children impacted by ICE, with steps taken to protect privacy and safety. You can learn more and support the Sanctuary Stories project here.

• “‘Everything We Do Matters.’ Minneapolis’s Moon Palace Books is a Hub For Anti-ICE Resistance,” via Literary Hub.

• We Here Press is releasing the third printing of The House Archives Built and Other Thoughts on Black Archival Possibilities by Dorothy Berry next week! Sign up here to be notified.

• On February 28 at the Sitting Room Library in Penngrove, CA, Cita editorial director Jessi Haley will partner with the Togethering Lab’s Christie George to facilitate a round table on cultivating creative attention via “book reports.” Details and RSVP info here.

• Speaking of the Sitting Room, the prompt for their annual anthology provides an opportunity to highlight a remarkable, overlooked woman from your own personal canon! Anyone, anywhere can submit. Learn more via Iris Jamahl Dunkle at .

• The latest episode of North Gate Radio from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism includes segments on the creation of the US’ first College of Ethnic Studies and one of the first Women’s and Gender Studies programs (which was recently cut).

• In addition to his work at the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Jason Rosenberg is co-president of the Duke Law Art Collective, which aims to give law students a place to exercise their creative skills as well as promote and educate about the various types of legal practices that involve art.

At the end of each year, we ask Cita Press contributors, advisory board members, readers, staff, and collaborators to share their favorite reads from the departing year. In 2025, we received dozens of submissions by email, Instagram, and beyond.

These recommendations come to us from people reading all over the world; the books themselves from authors/ translators writing across time and space. Publishers of all sizes bring these works into our homes. We are grateful to everyone whose work pulled this list together for us.

The collection contains echoes of the lists from previous years; it also varies widely in terms of subject, style, context. If there is a theme linking the books on this year’s list, it’s time: how we pass it, perceive it, mark it, steal it, embrace it. We won’t take up any more of your time now reflecting; instead we invite you to dig in and find the book(s) you’ll love in 2026!

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Fiction

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken (New Directions, 2025)

“This book is an atmospherically spooky historical novel about sixteenth-century Danish women accused of witchcraft, written in the language of spells.” —Brianna Thompson (@dr.bbwrites), Cita reader

“The Wax Child reclaims the voices of women executed during the seventeenth-century witch trials in Denmark. Ravn, who’s known for her inventive use of form, tells the narrative from the point of view of a wax doll made by one of the women, giving us an intimate view of the real lives of women whose practices were misunderstood. Based on years of research in the archives, Ravn has created a form that talks back to the archival violence done against these women.” —Iris Jamahl Dunkle,

Euphoria by Elin Cullhed, translated by Jennifer Hayashida (Canongate Books, 2022)

“A luminous portrayal of a brilliant mind who is at once at battle with herself and with the constraints that society has placed on her.” —Canongate; recommended by Andrijana (@andrijanuri), Cita Reader

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett (Harper, 2016)

“I had never read any of Ann Patchett’s novels. This year I read her 2016 book Commonwealth, a story of two families whose lives are interlaced across generations and geography. It’s an absorbing, layered read that surely influenced another great family novel I read recently, Paul Miller’s The Bee Sting. I’ll be reading more of Patchett’s writing!” —Gita Manaktala, Cita Advisory Board

An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter in collaboration with the author (Columbia University Press, 2021)

“The first novel I read this year is one I’ve thought about pretty much every day since I finished it. The original, published in 1995, incorporated lots of English and a left-to-right reading layout. Once considered ‘untranslatable,’ this masterpiece plays with the form of the Japanese ‘I-novel’ to interrogate the protagonist’s relationship to language, literature, family, and herself.” —Jessi Haley, Cita editorial director

Who Wants to Live Forever by Hanna Thomas Uose (Brazen, 2025)

“A thoughtful exploration of what it means to ‘have more time’.” —Yaa Addae (@yaa.dae), Cita reader

Us Fools by Nora Lange (Two Dollar Radio, 2024)

“I stumbled onto this at Book Suey, a local bookstore co-op – the cover stood out to me (classic graphic designer moment). I really enjoyed the writing style, and the abundance of bizarre lines that forced me to carry sticky notes around with me so I could save their spots in my library copy and then read them aloud to my friends with zero context. I was kind of surprised at how mixed the reviews for this book were; to me, it read like the memoir of a manic pixie dream girl, in the best way. I found it unique and darkly funny; a fever dream of a book.” —Mariana Matos, Cita design coordinator

Los peligros de fumar en la cama / The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell (Anagrama, 2009; Hogarth, 2021)

“Horror is not normally a genre I read a lot, but Enríquez’s gripping stories are more akin to magical realism, and in a year full of unrest in which attention spans have been hard to maintain, her stories were great accompaniments on my daily walks, which happen to cross a cemetery…” —Janneke Adema, Cita Advisory Board

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins (Ecco Press, 2016)

“I am recommending Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, a story collection by Kathleen Collins (with a foreword by Elizabeth Alexander). Collins was a ‘pioneer African American filmmaker (Losing Ground), playwright and educator’ working in the 1970s and 80s. Collins’ collection opens with ‘Exteriors’, a bloodless portrait of the end of a romance through the lens of a camera. Readers will want to find her work on film.” —Opal Moore, Wintergreen Women Writers Collective

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hogarth, 2025)

“I’ve never experienced a book capturing the unique experience of being Indian and American quite like this one does.” —Neha Sampat (@nehainprint), Cita reader

Salt House by Hazel Hawthorne (Provincetown Arts Press, 2025)

“Once a legend of the Cape Cod literary scene, Hawthorne was ‘Beat’ long before that genre was coined. In her 1934 forgotten masterpiece, the lyrical musings of a lovelorn Bohemian diarist feel as ephemeral as ocean foam, but this recent reissue cast a hypnotic spell over us!” —Amy Helmes and Kim Askew,

Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine (One World, 2020)

“Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home.” —One World; recommended by Melissa Phillips (@melissa_phillips), Cita reader

Thirst For Salt by Madelaine Lucas (Tin House, 2023)

“A magnetic and unforgettable story of desire and its complexities, and a powerful reckoning with memory, loss, and longing, Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel, Thirst for Salt, reveals with stunning, sensual immediacy the way the past can hold us in its thrall, shaping who we are and what we love.” —Tin House; recommended by Melissa Phillips (@melissa_phillips), Cita reader

The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf, 2025)

“From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town.” —Knopf, recommended by Felipe Torres Medina (@felipetorresmedina), Cita reader

Huaco Retrato de Gabriela Wiener (Literatura Random House, 2022)

“El pretexto de esta historia es una auténtica curaduría del patrimonio cultural latinoamericano, específicamente peruano, genial.” —@rosssie.ro, Cita reader

Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston (Aqueduct Press, 2011)

“This year I read Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston. Well technically I re-read it, but it felt salient to revisit after the release of Sinners :].” —Chelle Sanders, Software Preservation Network

Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin (Manilla Press, 2025)

“Such a careful examination of faith, grief and family — all at once.” —Yaa Addae (@yaa.dae), Cita reader

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (New Directions, 2016; originally published in 2000)

“The best book I read in 2025 was Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai. It immediately became one of my favorite novels and the book I recommend regardless of who I’m talking to. It’s the story of a mother, Sybylla, and her savant son, Ludo. It’s the story of someone adopting fiction as a means to explain their origin.” —Daniel Saldaña París, Cita contributor

Image by Svea Mausolf (Gutkind Verlag, 2025)

“Incredible!” —Juliana Vargas Zapata (@julianavargasz), Cita reader

Comfort Me With Apples by Catherynne M. Valente (‎ Tordotcom, 2021)

“I first learned of Valente’s Comfort Me With Apples in a thread about contemporary fantastic horror; it was described as a feminist retelling of the biblical origin story of Adam and Eve. While true, Valente’s interplay of myth and modernity provides a depth and richness to the novella that far exceeds reduction to any one other tale, even one as dense as Genesis. The novella follows Sophia, who finds herself in a bizarre mystery within her ‘perfect’ Eden which has been modernized with a HOA and strict social norms.” —Ethan Werner, Cita contributor & 2025 intern (read the 2023 recommendation from Eric Martin)

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2012-2015)

“Beginning with My Brilliant Friend, the four Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante follow Elena and Lila, from their rough-edged upbringing in Naples, Italy, not long after WWII, through the many stages of their lives—and along paths that diverge wildly. Sometimes they are separated by jealousy or hostility or physical distance, but the bond between them is unbreakable, for better or for worse.” —Europa; recommended by Andrijana (@andrijanuri), Cita Reader

Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books, 2025)

“One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.”—Riverhead; recommended by Felipe Torres Medina (@felipetorresmedina), Cita reader

Niñapájaroglaciar de Mariana Matija (Rey Naranjo, 2023)

“una joya completa❤️” —Valentina (@valentinaoviedoa), Cita reader

Birds in Flight by Anni Taylor (2023)

“This captivating story is a profound exploration of journeys—from girlhood to womanhood, sibling bonds to motherhood, and the quest for personal autonomy. Filled with rich details of landscape and nature, it masterfully illustrates themes of loss and possession. With a cast of compelling characters, it’s one of the best fiction reads I’ve come across in a long time.” —Christy Hyman, Cita contributor

Nonfiction

The Snag: A Mother, A Forest, and Wild Grief by Tessa McWatt (Random House Canada, 2025)

“From the award-winning author of Shame On Me, Guyanese-Canadian-British author Tessa McWatt. A brilliant meditation on personal and political losses at a time of increasing dementia rates, climate change, and pandemic-related loneliness. I loved this book so much! ” —Mary Chapman, Cita contributor

Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson (Wave Books, 2025)

“Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth is an account of how chronic pain becomes a companion and a problem to solve. But it’s also a diary of pandemic isolation, dreams, grief and parenting and what it is to live through them (all, like the pain, persistent) in a body under duress.” —Juliana Castro Varón, Cita founder

Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era by Nell Painter (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008)

“Painter expertly navigates the political, economic, and particularly social factors that contributed to the nation’s evolution from an agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse. An important read for understanding the enduring struggle of the American worker.” —Christy Hyman, Cita contributor

Tastes Like War: A Memoir by Grace M. Cho (Feminist Press, 2019)

“Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history.” – Feminist Press, recommended by Melissa Phillips (@melissa_phillips), Cita reader

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade (Scribner, 2025)

“Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is a new biography about the formidable and important poet. Wade approaches Stein’s life in two halves: what happened during her lifetime and what happened afterward, revealing how she developed as an artist and how she sought to control the narrative of her legacy after her death. New evidence shows how Stein buried her early life in Paris as she was coming into her own as a poet, and Wade carefully weaves it into this groundbreaking biography.” —Iris Jamahl Dunkle,

After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek (Verso, 2023)

“I was drawn to this book by a simple question: why does free time feel non-existent? It offers a brilliant explanation of how capitalism secretly relies on the invisible support of domestic work to keep itself standing. It shows how the system uses our unpaid care and chores as fuel, while we keep hoping technology will save us. It’s a powerful reality check on why we are so tired, and what it would take to actually reclaim our lives.” —Catalina Vásquez, Cita contributor

Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age by Joy Harjo (W.W. Norton & Company, 2025)

“It’s a light house for these dark times.” —Camila Higuera (@camilahigueracaldas), Cita reader

Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War by Hilary N. Green (Fordham University Press, 2025)

“Green sheds light on the challenges of uncovering these vital narratives from Black chroniclers, making her work not only informative but also essential for understanding the complexities of Black history. This book is a compelling read for anyone looking to deepen their appreciation of diverse historical perspectives.”—Christy Hyman, Cita contributor

The Journalist and the Murderer (Knopf, 1990) and Iphigenia in Forest Hills: The Anatomy of a Murder Trial (Yale University Press, 2011) by Janet Malcolm

“This year I re-read a number of books by Janet Malcolm, the most compelling of which, from my perspective, were The Journalist and the Murderer and Iphigenia in Forest Hills: The Anatomy of a Murder Trial. She’s an incredibly perceptive, incisive, psychologically-minded writer, and everything she writes is gripping, but it’s in these two books that she really analyzes (and skewers) the U.S. legal system. She demonstrates, through her involvement with real-life cases, that what’s at stake in the courtroom isn’t justice, but self-presentation and rhetoric.” —Mikita Brottman, Cita contributor

A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury, 2025)

“I am a fan of Toews. She brings her plain speaking, lyrical prose of All My Puny Sorrows and Fight Night to this recent mediation/memoir on ‘why I write’.” —JoAnn Borri, Cita contributor

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer (Seven Stories Press, 2022)

“Getting Lost is a diary of an affair: divorced, accomplished, nearing 50, Ernaux falls for a much younger, married Soviet diplomat. Each day she writes a brief entry—she waits, he visits, she waits again; he calls, or doesn’t. She grows jealous, consumed, adrift. Desperate but thrilling.” —Juliana Castro Varón, Cita founder

Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War by Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black (Oxford University Press, 2024)

“This book offers a poignant exploration of the complex journey toward freedom, vividly capturing the rich tapestry of life in the antebellum Low Country of South Carolina. It beautifully illustrates the struggles and triumphs of those who sought liberation in a world filled with both beauty and hardship.” —Christy Hyman, Cita contributor

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate (Little, Brown and Company, 2019)

“In her dazzling, impossible-to-categorize debut, Jenny channels the pain and beauty of life in writing so fresh, so new, and so burstingly alive, we catch her vision like a fever and bring it back out into the bright day with us, where everything has changed.” —Little, Brown; recommended by Melissa Phillips (@melissa_phillips), Cita reader

Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten (Crown, 2024)

“Ina details her journey to becoming a household name by a long set of risky business decisions and unapologetic living. Her story made me realize it’s never too late to chase your dreams!” —Amelia (@itsamelia.xyz), Cita reader

Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Haymarket Books, 2025)

“I keep returning to Theory of Water. Anytime Simpson publishes something new, whether fiction, poetry, or nonfiction (as here), I cannot help but to pause everything else to read. In establishing an Indigenous theory of water, Simpson provides an evergreen mode of engagement with our world through increasingly crucial reflections on the relationality and agents of elemental reality. —Ethan Werner, Cita contributor & 2025 intern

Poetry

Room Swept Home by Remica Bingham-Risher (Wesleyan University Press, 2024)

“Room Swept Home brings me home to the ‘country place’ of my youth where my kin taught me to love the land and those who faithfully tended it. Her poems are time machines that transport me to my grandmother’s front yard where the joy, trauma, and sadness of life could be managed as I raked the sand clean.” —Joanne Veal Gabbin, Wintergreen Women Writers Collective

“How can something so far be so bright?
           I know it seems I’ve dreamed this
                      but my grandmothers are with me as sure as there is light”

—from “because the scale of our breathing is planetary, at the very least” by Remica Bingham-Risher, Room Swept Home

What Else?

• “i am running into a new year…”: 2023 Favorite Reads

• “So much of any year is flammable…”: 2024 Favorite Reads

• In 2025, we had the chance to connect with Cita readers and partners in person across thousands of miles via nearly a dozen book fairs, panels, workshops, round tables, and other events. Many of those connections helped grow this newsletter and fuel future publications and projects. Here’s to more meeting. and reading together in 2026!

• Happy (almost!) Public Domain Day! Watch this space and our Instagram for a celebration of what is new in the public domain in terms of feminist literature and art in 2026.

In 2019, then-Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden named Joy Harjo (b. 1951) the 23rd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. With this appointment, Harjo became the first Native American person to hold the title. For her signature project as poet laureate, she created Living Nations, Living Words: an interactive map, online audio collection, and companion anthology exploring poetry by forty-seven contemporary Native poets. The work invites readers to connect words to physical space and environments, and to start to understand the roots, depth and diversity of work by contemporary Native Nations poets writing in the United States today.

In the recordings that comprise the audio portion of Living Nations, Living Words, each participating poet provides some context for their selection. A sampling:

• “I am allowing the desert to become a place of desire because I know the ways that we think about the desert, and I know the ways that my country has thought about Indigenous peoples.” —Natalie Diaz on “Postcolonial Love Poem”

• “So, this poem was written as a help—as a helper for myself. I offer it here for anyone who needs…[something] that will…get you to your real, true task in life, which is to be more aware. To be in touch with the great movements of the universe. To be in touch with the sacred. With the profound. With the idiotic. With the sensual.” —Louise Erdrich on “Advice to Myself”

• “In the popular imagination, Native peoples appear primarily after the so-called discovery of this continent. In this poem, I wanted to suggest the reality that precedes invasion and colonization: the autonomy of Indigenous tribes, their place-making, embedded relationships, their lifeways.” —Kimberley Blaeser on “Poem on Disappearance”

Living Nations, Living Words inspired another digital humanities project, this one focused on poets of the past: Mapping Indigenous Poetry of North America, 1830-1924 by Hannah Provost. Provost has placed poems on the digital map based on references to place in the actual poems and/or significant locations from the authors’ lives.1 She also created a visualization that organizes the works by theme. “Nature, land ownership, and…environmental justice, are the most prevalent themes in the poetry collected here,” Provost observes in the introduction. All of the poems in the project are in the public domain in the United States.

In When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, a 2020 anthology edited by Harjo (with Leanne Howe and Jennifer Elise Foerster and contributing editors), poets from both mapping projects appear together. The volume collects work that spans three centuries—and that reflects many more centuries of culture rooted in the lands of North America. For this month’s Bulletin, we dig into words, images and voices that we are grateful to have access to, thanks to the hard work of many stewards.

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Cita Canon Spotlight

We spotlight two poets that appear in both Mapping Indigenous Poetry of North America, 1830-1924 and in the Joy Harjo-edited Norton collection, as well as the drawings of one avant-garde visual artist whose work is finally starting to be exhibited and appreciated.

The daughter of a hereditary Mohawk chief and an English immigrant, E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake, 1861-1913) grew up in a well-connected middle class family. Her grandfather, John Smoke Johnson (Sakayengwaraton), taught her and her siblings about their heritage through traditional oral storytelling in the Mohawk language; Pauline would later emulate his style in her own public performances. She began publishing poetry in Canadian and US journals in her early twenties, and in 1892 she made waves with “A Strong Race Opinion: On the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction,” a sharp critique of how Native women had been portrayed in Canadian literature.

Johnson toured the world giving performances of her work, often switching between costumes that approximated Native dress and fashionable Euro-style gowns. She used both her English name and the Mohawk “Tekahionwake,” the birth name of her great-grandfather that translates to “double-life.” Her poetry collections, starting with The White Wampum (1895), were critically and commercially successful. Breast cancer forced her retirement from public life, and her later collections of prose and poetry were facilitated by friends to raise money for her care. Her public funeral was reportedly the largest in Vancouver’s history.

In a 1997 essay, Mohawk writer and poet Beth Brant asserts that narratives around Johnson’s historic popularity bely the radical nature of her work and ideas. “She has been ignored and dismissed by present-day critics and feminists,” Brant writes, “but this is just another chapter in the long novel of dismissal of Native women’s writing.” Today, her books Flint and Feather (1912) and Legends of Vancouver (1911) are still in print. The latter text was updated and republished in 2023 under the name Legends of the Capilano after editor Alix Shield found a note in Johnson’s archives reflected her wish that the collection be named after and reflect her collaboration with Chief Joe Capilano (Sahp-luk) and Mary Capilano (Lixwelut). [“E. Pauline Johnson” by Alix Shield for The People and the Text; “Celebrating the Legacy of E. Pauline Johnson — Tekahionwake” by Lisa Wilson Palmour for UBC Library.]

“Moonset” by E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake )

Idles the night wind through the dreaming firs, 
That waking murmur low,
As some lost melody returning stirs 
The love of long ago; 
And through the far, cool distance, zephyr fanned,
The moon is sinking into shadow-land. 
The troubled night-bird, calling plaintively,
Wanders on restless wing; 
The cedars, chanting vespers to the sea,
Await its answering,
That comes in wash of waves along the strand,
The while the moon slips into shadow-land. 
O! soft responsive voices of the night
I join your minstrelsy,
And call across the fading silver light
As something calls to me;
I may not all your meaning understand,
But I have touched your soul in shadow-land. 

—from Flint and Feather (1912).

Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay, 1800-1842) is considered the first or one of the first Native American literary writers in English. Like Pauline Johnson, she grew up in a prominent family shaped by both European and Native heritage. She was born in what is now known as Michigan; her mother was the daughter of an Ojibwe leader. Jane spoke both Ojibwe and English in her daily life, and, though she wrote mainly in English, she also wrote poems in Ojibwe and translated Ojibwe songs into English.

Together with her husband, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Jane created the handwritten, personally distributed magazine Literary Voyager, or Muzzeniegun/Muzzinyegun (Ojibwe for “book”, 1826–7). It was the first magazine in Michigan and the first periodical to focus on Native culture. Many of Jane’s poems and stories were first published in the magazine under the pseudonyms “Leelinau” and “Rosa.” Though the collaborations with Jane and her family that made Literary Voyager possible are obliquely referenced in the issues, it is only recently that the full scope of Jane’s input has started to be recognized.2 Eventually, Henry’s published work—built on unattributed contributions and twisted or transformed to suit his own tastes and biases—became the source material for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s immensely popular The Song of Hiawatha (1855).

As years went on, Henry’s work as a U.S. Indian Agent and his reach as an early cultural anthropologist meant that he was often away. Meanwhile Jane was isolated, in poor health, and grieving the loss of two children and her separation from her two surviving children (who were sent to assimilationist boarding schools against her wishes). She died at just age forty-two.

Library of Congress curator Barbara Blair refers to Schoolcraft one of the earliest American nature writers, seeing her poetry as foundational for Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver. In addition to celebrating nature, female friendship, and the history and legends of her Ojibwe heritage, she also wrote about loneliness, grief, and alienation. Her full body of work reflects her position as a woman living across cultures, and one determined to preserve her individuality as well as the rich culture and language of her ancestors. In 2008, the publication of Robert Dale Parker’s The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft marked the first time Schoolcraft’s work was formally collected. [“‘She Could Look Into the Heavens’: Ojibwe Poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft” by Barbara Blair for LOC Blogs; “The Complex Worlds of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft” by Margaret Noori for Michigan Quarterly Review.]

“By an Ojibwa Female Pen” or “To sisters on a walk in the Garden, after a shower” by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay)

Come, sisters come! the shower’s past,
The garden walks are drying fast,
The Sun’s bright beams are seen again,
And nought within, can now detain.
The rain drops tremble on the leaves,
Or drip expiring, from the eaves;
But soon the cool and balmy air,
Shall dry the gems that sparkle there,
With whisp’ring breath shake ev’ry spray,
And scatter every cloud away.

Thus sisters! shall the breeze of hope,
Through sorrow’s clouds a vista ope;
Thus, shall affliction’s surly blast,
By faith’s bright calm be still’d at last;
Thus, pain and care,—the tear and sigh,
Be chased from every dewy eye;
And life’s mix’d scene itself, but cease,
To show us realms of light and peace.

—from The Literary Voyager (1826).

Last November, we included a brief mention of Mary Sully (Susan Mabel Deloria, 1896-1963)—and a then-ongoing exhibit of her work at The Met—in the Cita Canon Spotlight entry about her sister, Ella Cara Deloria. Now it’s time we celebrate Mary herself, who created distinctive modernist drawings that blended American Indian imagery, geometric patterns, and popular culture.

Susan Mabel Deloria was born on the Standing Rock Reservation; her parents were Yankton Sioux leader and Episcopal priest Tipi Sapa (Philip J. Deloria) and Mary Sully (Akicita Win). Her maternal grandfather was a military man who oversaw massacres of Indigenous people and her great-grandfather was a famous portrait artist who made the portrait of Andrew Jackson that still adorns the twenty-dollar bill. Susan and Ella grew up among the Hunkpapa and Sihasapa Lakota people, aware of their well-known non-Native family members but embedded in and committed to preserving their Sioux heritage.

In the 1920s, Susan adopted her mother’s name. She lived with her sister, moving from place to place and supporting Ella’s fieldwork. Though she spent some time studying art in college, she was self-taught, inventing her own way of depicting the world. Her “personality prints” were intricate puzzles that analyzed the cultural images of celebrities like Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire, Babe Ruth, and Gertrude Stein. Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present directly engages with the past, present and future of Native peoples.

In 2019, Sully’s great nephew, Philip J. Deloria3, published Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract—a project born from the literal dusting off of family ephemera that sparked a long-deserved reemergence. The first-ever solo exhibition of her work, Mary Sully: Native Modern moved from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Minneapolis Institute of Art earlier this year before closing in September. Today, you can still view her work in gallery 746 at The Met (she’s now in the permanent collection). [“The Unexpected Art of Mary Sully” by Elizabeth Pochoda for The Magazine ANTIQUES; “An Indigenous Modernist Artist Finally Gets Her Due” by Julie Schneider for Hyperallergic; The Mary Sully Foundation]

What Else?

• Did you read (and love) a book by a woman this year? Share it with us! Send us a book title/author and one sentence about why you recommend it to Cita readers. We’ll share it in the December issue of the Cita Press Bulletin and on our Instagram.

• Erin Marie Lynch, who wrote the foreword for Cita’s Planted in a Strange Earth: Selected Writings by Zitkála-Šá, is cofounder of the recently announced Indigenous Writers Workshop at the Center for California Literature in Los Angeles (launching 2026). Indigenous writers in the LA area can send a DM to [at]california.literature on Instagram with name, tribal affiliation, and email address for details.

• Earlier this week, launched 30 Days of Feminist History. They’ll be digging into their archives here on Substack and elsewhere, and giving readers a peek into what goes into preserving feminist legacies.

• Lost Ladies of Lit profiled the Sitting Room Library, our A Luminous Halo publication partner, in a recent episode of the podcast—featuring audio snippets of a literary dinner party Cita editorial director Jessi Haley was lucky to attend.

• Shop for the book lovers in your life at shop.citapress.org! Cover posters, books, & more. Last day for 2025 shipping is December 8.

• It’s been a busy fall for Cita, complete with events in Detroit, Philadelphia, and across the Bay Area. We’re grateful for these opportunities to connect with people. By subscribing to this newsletter, you give us a chance to reach you directly, and with more words (and nuance) than other platforms allow. All of this is rare gift in an algorithmically-driven internet landscape. So THANK YOU!

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In the introduction for an edition of Frankenstein tied to the new film adaptation, director Guillermo del Toro asserts that “horror can serve as a liberating or repressive social tool, and it is always an accurate reflection of the social climate of its time and the place where it is birthed.” This claim feels especially true when examined in relation to the tradition of horror writing by women, where conventions are upheld or torn apart depending on the author’s convictions and audiences. There is a long, layered legacy of women exploring the darkness of the material world by looking behind the veil.

In the 200+ years since it was first published, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s first novel has inspired countless adaptations and spinoffs and is considered the pioneer in introducing a scientific element to horror. The story of how Frankenstein came to be—dreamed up during a contest while its author was in Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron— is nearly as famous as its Monster himself. But holding up its more (R)omantic, remarkable origins is a relatable foundation. As del Toro explains:

“Mary Shelley was painfully young—a teenager, in fact—when she wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, and into the monster and his tale she was able to pour all her contradictions and her questions—her essential pleas and her feelings of disfranchisement and inadequacy.”

It’s no wonder that writers who find themselves stuck in a chasm between societal expectations and their authentic selves turn to the “weird.” This month, we’re examining four short works that each take a very different approach to the traditional hallmarks of a spooky tale, in terms of both the supernatural and the social. None of these are straightforward entries into the genres in terms of structure and effect. In fact, some might even call two of the stories here rather cozy. However, they all play on our fears, and how the societies we live in shape and are shaped by them. With chilling description, tragic irony, and even humor, they explore vanity, greed, control, loss, gender, and more. And they are all out of copyright; free to read, share, adapt!

Happy reading, and happy Halloween!

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“Transformation” by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1831)

When Frankenstein first came out in 1818, it was published anonymously as a three-volume set in a run of 500 copies. A dozen years later, a one-volume, heavily revised—and, some argue, toned down— edition of the book was published under the name Mary W. Shelley. This is the version most people read today. That same year Shelley published another Gothic tale about man’s quest for ultimate control featuring an ambiguous humanoid creature. “Transformation” follows Guido, who has squandered his wealth and torpedoed his planned marriage, as he agrees to a body swap with a mysterious “dwarf” imbued with supernatural powers. The “monster’s” appearance, movement, and voice repel Guido, but the creature’s assurances that he can provide incredible fortune in exchange for three days inhabiting the youth’s “comely face and limbs” prove irresistible. On the surface a simple morality tale about the dangers of greed, the story gives us a manipulative hero whom we come to suspect sold his soul long before he met his double.

“Transformation” appeared in the 1931 edition of The Keepsake, an anthology series to which Shelley was a frequent contributor. The Keepsake paired works of literature with engravings; often the engravings were made first and authors were commissioned to write in response to them. Editions were published annually, bound in red silk, and intended as holiday gifts for young women. One wonders how the wealthy young Englishwomen of 1831 interpreted Guido’s relationship to bodily autonomy, his objectification of his love interest (Juliet, the subject of the story’s engraving), and the lessons he—does not?— learn.

Read “Transformation” at Project Gutenberg. See the original in The Keepsake (with an engraving by Louisa Sharpe) and Shelley’s manuscript via the New York Public Library.

“The Yellow Tree” by DeReath Byrd Busey (1922)

From 1919 to 1927, writer Jessie Redmon Fauset served as literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP founded by W.E.B. DuBois. During Fauset’s tenure, she “midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being” (as Langston Hughes put it). The magazine published poetry and prose by leading writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Nella Larsen, and Anne Spencer. Its pages also included great work by women writers whose names many may no longer know.

“The Yellow Tree” by DeReath Byrd Busey is one such example. Published in the October 1922 issue, the story details the destruction that can come when social mores, existential dread, and superstition collide. One woman’s attempt to determine her family’s fate spirals out of control against a backdrop of neighborhood gossip, colorism, and the Great Migration.

Busey adapted “The Yellow Tree” into a play that was performed by the Howard Players in the same year it was published in The Crisis. Though she was part of a vibrant drama scene powered by socially conscious women playwrights, it’s hard to find any biographical information about her beyond brief mentions.1 In the absence of more background about the author of this haunting, complex tale, we can at least access her art.

Read “The Yellow Tree,” with annotations by Rene Marzuk, at The Envious Lobster. Explore the October 1922 issue of The Crisis via the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

“Clams: A Ghost Story” by Louisa May Alcott (1879)

Like her most famous protagonist, Little Women author Louisa May Alcott paid a lot of bills by writing what she called “blood and thunder stories.” Where Jo March burned her more sensationalist tales, vowing to write only from life, Alcott had affection for genre writing. Though she often published such work under a pseudonym, perhaps to uphold the refined reputation tied to her realist fiction, she wrote in her diary: “I fancy ‘lurid’ things, if true and strong also.” And her lesser known tales interrogate the same ideas around gender roles and performance that animate her most beloved classic works.

From 1872-1882, Alcott published six volumes of stories under the series title Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag. The lighthearted works in these collections were hardly “‘lurid’ things.” But readers who enjoy horror of the mostly-humorous flavor will enjoy “Clams,” a “ghost story” that gets just creepy enough for a cathartic thrill. A woman visiting seaside Maine is entertained by tales of local lore and excited about eating clams for the first time—until she isn’t. The fact that the protagonist is a woman traveling on her own triggers many of situations that lead to the story’s frights, but ultimately a decadent meal is just as responsible. After all, the neighborhood ghost “was allers civil to the ladies.”

Read “Clams” via Wikisource. Dig into Alcott’s “blood and thunder” with at .

“A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf (1921)

Monday or Tuesday—put out under Woolf’s own Hogarth Press—was the only story collection published during her lifetime. The book took its name from a passage in her 1919 essay “Modern Fiction” (emphasis added): 2

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.

Indeed the stories in Monday or Tuesday find accents in the familiar, leaving a profound psychological impact. “A Haunted House” is no exception. Woolf takes elements from ordinary life—cohabitation, domestic routines, a house, nature—and, in a handful of paragraphs, collapses time and space around them. The story is haunted, and haunting, in a way that feels both life affirming and emotionally devastating.

In 1944, two years after Virginia’s death, Leonard Woolf republished six of the eight stories from Monday or Tuesday alongside twelve more stories. In the preface, he doesn’t explain why he made “A Haunted House” the title story of the new collection. But one may wonder if this early work’s meditation on love found, lost, found, lost, and found again felt especially poignant in the face of his own personal loss. “Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first…”

Download an illustrated, printable version of “A Haunted House” here (design by Mariana Matos for Cita Press). See the original cover for A Haunted House and Other Stories, from the Woolf Wall at the Sitting Room Library in Penngrove, CA.

Cita Canon Spotlight

This month we’re formally inducting two Cita Press authors into the Cita Canon. Though Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Louisa May Alcott have plenty of name recognition, the depth and scope of their literary contributions have historically gone unrecognized.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1791-1851) was an English novelist and editor; her debut novel, Frankenstein (1818), is widely considered the first example of a modern science fiction novel. Her mother, the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote the touchstone A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; she died shortly after Mary’s birth. She was raised by her father, political philosopher William Godwin. As a teenager, she fell in love with one of her father’s admirers, poet and erstwhile aristocrat Percy Bysshe Shelley, and ran off with him. Over the next few years, they travelled back and forth from Europe, grappling with the tragic loss of three children, debt, and the strong disapproval of their families. In 1816, while visiting Lake Geneva a year after the loss of her first child, she first conceived of the idea for Frankenstein as part of a ghost story contest proposed by Lord Byron.

Mary and Percy married in late 1816 after the death of Percy’s first wife, Harriet. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published anonymously in 1818; many assumed Percy was the author at the time. He died in sailing wreck in 1822, leaving Mary to raise their surviving child, Percy Florence, on her own. She made her living as a writer and editor, publishing several more books and contributing to anthologies, journals and more. For decades, she was remembered mainly as the author of Frankenstein and in relation to her famous family members. Her efforts to cement her husband’s legacy as a poet were quite successful, perhaps at the expense of her own contemporary reputation. After her death at age fifty three from a brain tumor, her son sanitized much of the details of her life in his own attempts at legacy-making. In recent decades, scholars and readers have finally started to appreciate the full scope of Mary’s contributions and of her fascinating, tumultuous life. [The Shelley-Godwin Archive; Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley at Romantic Circles]

Read Mathilda by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley for free at Cita Press! Narrated by a young woman on her deathbed, the novella explores grief, despair, and redemption. Despite its deployment of familiar Gothic themes like suicide, incest, and a woman withering away, it can be read as a feminist reclamation of the genre. Cover by Kathy Mueller; foreword by Christina Standley.

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was an American author, educator, abolitionist, and feminist activist. While most widely known as the author of Little Women and three sequels about the March family, Alcott was prolific across genres. She was raised among transcendentalist figures like Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Alcott household was chaotic and financially insecure, but her parents encouraged Louisa’s literary ambitions and independent spirit. She dreamed of bringing her family out of poverty and making a living as a writer. Throughout her life, Alcott was active in abolitionist and other social reform movements. She attended rallies, gave speeches, and participated in grassroots actions; she also incorporated her convictions into her writing. In 1879, the state of Massachusetts allowed women to vote in town elections, specifically on issues related to children and education. Alcott went door to door encouraging women to register. She herself became the first woman to register to vote in Concord, MA.

Alcott’s first published book, Flower Fables, came out in 1854. Later that decade, she began contributing stories to The Atlantic Monthly. In 1861, Hospital Sketches (based on her time as a volunteer nurse for the Union Army) marked her first major literary success. In 1868, she published the instant classic Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. All told, she authored twenty novels (including two that posthumously published), and many novellas, stories, poems, and essays. In addition to work published under her own name, she often used the pseudonym A.M. Barnard or published anonymously. [“Louisa May Alcott: A Resource Guide”, at the Library of Congress]

Read Behind a Mask by Louisa May Alcott for free at Cita Press! One of the thrillers Alcott published as A.M. Barnard, the novel subverts expectations around gender performance, class, and heroism as it follows a down-on-her-luck actress who disguises herself as a young governess and infiltrates a wealthy family. Cover by Lauren Smedley.

A spooky sonnet by Christina Rossetti

For another Halloween treat, we present this 1849 sonnet by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). Rossetti composed this as part of an exercise called “bouts-rimés” where one person comes up with rhyming words and the other builds a poem from them. She sent the poem to her brother, W. M. Rossetti, as contribution to an ongoing bouts-rimés game between the Rossetti siblings. The poem reflects many of the themes and images Rossetti would return to in her later, published work, including around the veil between fantasy and reality, and how our desires are reflected and distorted in dreams.3

Images compiled from the public domain.

What Else?

• Editorial director Jessi Haley will be at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference in Philadelphia next week. If you’re planning to attend, give her a shout (jessi@citapress.org). Looking forward to panels, workshops, hangs, and visiting the mural Frances E.W. Harper: We Are All Bound Up Together (part of #Harper200) !

• We’ll be exhibiting at the PAMLA Annual Conference in San Francisco from November 20-23. Stop by for print books, free zines/bookmarks and new merch!

• If you’re hungry for horror by women in print, check out Valancourt Books’ series Monster, She Wrote (mentioned in the latest episode of !

  • Internet Archive hosts a large digitized collection of issues of Weird Tales, which include regular contributions by prolific women horror writers like Greye La Spina, Eli Colter, and more. See The Women of Weird Tales to learn more.

• Audio versions of two stories discussed in this issue, from LibriVox:

  • “Transformation” by Mary Shelley

  • “A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf (many options here!)

• It’s somehow almost that time of year again! Each December, the Cita team compiles a list of recent-ish books by women we read and loved during the year. Send us a book title/author and one sentence about why you recommend it to Cita readers to info@citapress.org.

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“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

—Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”

It is perhaps obvious to most people who are interested in Cita’s larger project that the writing of Virginia Woolf is central to our work and mission. Her books are, of course, feminist classics—interrogating gender norms as thoroughly as they rewrite the formal conventions of prose. But as celebrated as novels like Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando are, and as evident as the influence of A Room of One’s Own remains, much of Woolf’s critical writing remains under-read by her ideal audience: the people who read not necessarily because they are fulfilling some scholarly or professional purpose, but because they want to. The kind of person she, like Samuel Johnson before her, lovingly termed “the common reader.”

Virginia Woolf was not the first writer to examine the complex web of relationships between life and literature, but she is certainly one of the very best. Therefore we are thrilled to present our newest addition to the Cita catalog: A Luminous Halo: Selected Writings by Virginia Woolf. From “Modern Fiction” to “How Should One Read a Book,” “The Mark on the Wall,” and more, the essays (and one short story) contained in this collection are essential for any common reader interested in how a singular figure built a bridge between her ideas and her art form. Here they come together in one volume for the first time, selected and introduced by guest editor JoAnn Borri.

You can now read the book for free in our online reader, or download a PDF or EPUB of the book. You can also print a mini-zine of “A Mark on the Wall,” designed by our own Mariana Matos, who also created the cover for this book. A print edition, which includes two works that are not yet in the public domain in the U.S., is coming soon.

Subscribe now

A Luminous Halo: A Collaborative Project

A Luminous Halo was sponsored by and created in partnership with the Sitting Room Library in Penngrove, California. Home to the “Woolf Wall,” extensive archives related to Woolf and other women writers, and thousands of books, the Sitting Room is dedicated to literature and art by women. Anyone can visit to explore the collection and spend time reading and writing among the redwoods and words. Volunteers and regulars come from a range of professional and personal backgrounds; together they create an inviting atmosphere perfect for sharing knowledge, stories, and the joy of discovery. It is a physical sanctuary for any reader, especially us common ones. It is also, for those who can’t visit in person, a model for building community around a love of books and learning. A perusal of the Sitting Room’s catalog and archives list will show that many of their books and other materials overlap with Cita Press titles and subjects of this Bulletin. We couldn’t imagine a better partner for this project.

Nor could we conjure a better collaborator than JoAnn Borri, who is the mind behind the book’s contents and the voice who introduces readers to the book. JoAnn curates the Woolf Wall and is a devoted common reader of all things Virginia Woolf. As she writes in the foreword: “I cannot get enough. I chase after her words and thoughts with my hair ‘flying back like the tail of a racehorse,’ attempting to grasp her meaning and understand the working of her mind and imagination.” JoAnn’s passion invites us into the project of the book, leading us to find pleasure, wisdom and truth in Woolf’s reflections.

The cover illustration and editorial design is by Mariana Matos, Cita’s communications and design coordinator. Mariana creates the images for this Bulletin and for our Instagram (check out her animated promos for ALH), and is the day-to-day design brain expanding the foundation laid by our founder, Juliana Castro Varón. Beyond her work with Cita, Mariana is an interdisciplinary designer whose work explores the intersections between digital and physical design. Her other projects include:

• Orchid: a hand-bound, partially riso-printed, completely self-authored book discussing Mariana’s experiences as an immigrant.

• Space Place Landscape: a publication and interactive installation. The project asks viewers to truly consider the physical spaces we move through, and how we do (or don’t) shape them with our presence.

“View from the studio at Monk’s House”

Mariana Matos on creating the cover of A Luminous Halo:

In the foreword for A Luminous Halo, JoAnn Borri writes about how this collection and Woolf’s work directly connect to Cita’s mission. Her line “created by a Common Reader and made available to Common Readers via Cita Press, a library open to all with no barriers or closed doors to keep anyone out” put an image of an open door in the back of my mind as I read the book. Then, when I got to Woolf’s essay “How Should One Read a Book?”, I came across this passage:

“To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.”

This quote really stuck with me as I began sketching different cover ideas, and very naturally merged with the image of a door. The title of the collection already evokes such a strong image to me, I just had to figure out where that glow should be coming from — an open door, yes, but opening to what? Possibility, limitless space for thought, something new or important revealed to you beyond the threshold.

I thought about Woolf’s words and philosophy, and decided to step into her shoes. What better way to lead the reader into Woolf’s world than by inviting them to inhabit not only her mind but her physical space: the “writing shed” where she penned much of her work. The composition is from the point of view of the reader as Woolf, sitting inside, and watching warm sunlight stream in through the open door. Woolf also had dogs during both childhood and adulthood. Dogs seemed to not only be a source of companionship for her, but also inspiration, so it felt right to include one on the cover. The sleeping dog is based off a photo of Woolf with her dog Pinka (featured in our “Writers & their Dogs” Instagram post). Historically, dogs have also been used in art and literature as symbols for protection and guidance.

Imagine stepping through the doorway into the light; Pinka, sensing your presence, wakes from sleep, ready to be your guide through Woolf’s world and words.

The Woolf Wall and beyond

The Sitting Room Library’s Woolf Wall is tangible: shelves to pull from, folders to flip through, treasures to touch and to hold. The collection has been built over decades, and, though it is open to all, an in-person visit is the only way to engage with it—for now. As JoAnn explains:

In addition to a complete collection of all of Woolf’s novels, essays, diaries and letters, the Woolf Wall offers an extensive selection of works that tell the story of Woolf, her family, friends and contemporaries, including the authors and artists of the well-known Bloomsbury group, and indeed much of the history of art and English literature in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The Woolf Archives include documents and essays created without the benefit of the internet or the personal computer. A complete set of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany can be found in Box 4, as well as letters to the Sitting Room Library from Woolf scholars, family members and friends.

Although the books and archives may only be accessed in person, the Sitting Room Library staff are working with Cita Press to make more of our materials accessible online.

Over time, we will be adding selected material from the Woolf Wall archives to the Are.na channel for this book. Right now the channel hosts things that are already online, such as: 1970s radio broadcast readings; digitized images from the Berg Collection; scanned originals of pieces from the book; books from the ALH bibliography; and much more. The channel is open, so anyone can collaborate and add to it. Be our “accomplice”…

A key section of the Woolf Wall collection is already available to you from any location. J.J. Wilson, a co-founder of the Sitting Room and professor emerita of English at Sonoma State University, co-founded the Virginia Woolf Miscellany in 1973. In the very first issue, J.J. and fellow editors Peggy Comstock, Rebecca Davison, Ellen Rogat, and Lucio Ruotolo made explicit the role of the journal’s readers:

Virginia Woolf’s work is being read today with a new energy, intensity and sympathy. There exists a growing demand for information about her life and work from the common reader as well as the scholar. The Virginia Woolf Miscellany will attempt to answer some of these needs. In doing so, we hope to involve readers in what are usually termed “editorial” decisions…As the existence and value of this venture depend upon your involvement, please give your attention to our questionnaire printed on the mail-back insert .

Vara Neverow, Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Southern Connecticut State University and editor of the Miscellany since 2003, has continued this spirit. The journal still encourages contributions and feedback from readers, and all issues of the journal are fully available, for free, online.

Our roles as common readers

It is our hope that this project expands your engagement with Woolf’s body of work, inspiring you to seek out more of her writing and to connect with her ideas when you read other writers, across genres. For, though the works we’ve brought together were written 95+ years ago, Woolf’s thoughts— and the layered, gorgeous way she unravels them for us—are more vital than ever. For us common readers, reading is a pastime, an escape, a tool for enduring a commute or a waiting room. But it is also a way to make sense of this world, of digesting realities, and of navigating how everything is always the same but also always “moving, falling, slipping, vanishing.” And Woolf is the perfect guide for understanding how books help us do this.

JoAnn Borri puts it perfectly:

My hope is that this partnership will introduce Woolf’s essays to a new group of readers who didn’t even know they wanted to read Woolf’s essays. Also, I feel certain that Woolf would approve of any project that provides free and open access to women’s literature.

What Else?

• Explore the A Luminous Halo Are.na channel for links, images, ebooks, and more.

• For more Cita Press Bulletin x Virginia Woolf, read:

  • “...let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.” (January 2025): On the enduring power of A Room of One’s Own; the women who shaped Woolf; “repairing” the past via the public domain?

  • “...there is no gate, no lock, no bolt, that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” (July 2024): On Mad pride via Madwomen in the Attic, Ten Days in a Mad-House & Virginia Woolf; The Snake Pit, Camille Claudel.

  • “...in my day I was a Pioneer and a Menace,” (February 2024): Untangling the public domain via Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen.

• Thank you to everyone who came out to the Litquake Small Press Book Fair this past weekend to support indie presses, booksellers, and writers. It was so wonderful to talk about books with so many thoughtful, kind people. Special thanks to the Litquake organizers, the performers from Litquake Out Loud, the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival staff, and festival sponsor Alta Journal.

• Mariana will be representing Cita at the Detroit Art Book Fair on Saturday, October 11 (12-6 pm) and Sunday, October 12 (12-4 pm) at Trinosophes. Each year, the fair brings together dozens of independent publishers, artists, writers, and collectors to present their books, zines, and prints to the public. Free! Open to all!

• You can catch Jessi in the Bay Area again in just two weeks for the Litquake panel “Scribbling Women” Strike Back! She’ll be talking about recovering women’s writing and legacies with Kim Askew and Amy Helmes of Lost Ladies of Lit; Iris Jamahl Dunkle, author of Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb and Finding Lost Voices; Jessica Ferri of Womb House Books; Mimi Pond, author of Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me; and Emily Van Duyne, author of Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation. October 14, 7 pm, at Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley—details and RSVP here.

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Every August, Women in Translation Month invites us to take part in two deeply satisfying experiences: discovery and celebration. To find a new author or book that resonates, to connect with others who are also excited about that author or book, to savor the miracle of doing this across time/place/tongue—we can all use as much of this kind of joy as we can get.

Translators are, of course, the essential facilitators for these activities. In research for Cita, we often come across writers whose work is not available in translation, despite the impact that this work has made and its continued relevance to readers around the world. When writers die, their legacy is left at the mercy of other stewards, and the sea of neglected art is vast and deep. But there are people who dive into that sea, bring up some of its treasures, and transform them into new works that can be shared more widely.

At the end of July, we explored literary translation through the lens of the Cita Press Literary Translation and Technology Project, with help from Daniel Saldaña París and Christina MacSweeney. This month, we’re digging into new “Cita Canon” inductees: three writers whose work is ripe for further translation.

Of these three, one writer has at least one full-length piece available in English. Two have Wikipedia pages available in multiple languages; in general the volume of biographical information available in translation varies. All three have champions: scholars and translators who are actively working to nurture their legacies. And each woman deserves more when it comes to international legacy: more recognition, more visibility, more readers—more opportunities to be discovered, celebrated.

Thank you to Makafane Tšepang Ntlamelle and Anna Friedrich for directly contributing to this Bulletin. We are also deeply grateful to Yung-Hee Kim for her scholarship. Finally, we’d like to thank Erick for connecting us to Albertina Bertha, and to invite anyone to write to us with suggestions for other writers we should highlight in the future.

—Jessi Haley, Cita Press editorial director

Na Hye-sŏk 나혜석 (1896-1948)

From her youth, there was intense controversy around the personal life and work of Korean artist and writer Na Hye-sŏk—controversy that fueled what scholar Yung-Hee Kim describes as a transition from celebrity status to “decades-long erasure from the memory of Korean society itself.”1 Na, who used the art name Jeongwol (정월; 晶月), pushed back against not just the norms of her aristocratic family, but the norms of society as a whole.

Na began writing about women’s issues while studying at Tokyo Women’s College of Arts; there she became involved in Korean literary and activist circles. In 1918, she published the short story “Kyŏnghŭi (경희)” in the magazine Yo ̆jagye(Women’s World). The story—“the first full-blown, feminist short story in Korean literature”—was radical in its portrayal of a protagonist who embodied the “New Woman” in her hunger for education and independence.2 Na was a founding contributor to Korea’s first feminist magazine, Sinyôja (“New Woman”; 新女子), in 1920. The following year she became the first woman painter to exhibit her work in Seoul. 

In the years that followed, Na continued to build her career as an artist and to publish bold, confessional essays and fiction that directly challenged societal expectations. “Thoughts on Becoming a Mother,” for example, called out her husband for expecting her to shoulder all parental responsibilities in their relationship. Later, after a brutal, much-publicized divorce, she published “Confessions on My Divorce,” breaking several taboos.

The end of Na Hye-sŏk’s life was tragic, reflecting the huge amount of risk she took on in service of challenging the status quo and owning her ideals and ambitions. However, her work lives on as a testament to both her talent and her bravery, and since the mid-1990s there has been a “virtual Na Hye-sŏk boom in Korean feminist studies.”3 In 2000, the Seoul Art Center staged a retrospective of her paintings. In 2010, “Kyŏnghŭi” was included in the collection Questioning Minds: Short Stories by Modern Korean Women Writers, curated and translated by Yung-Hee Kim. All of Na Hye-sŏk’s writing is in the public domain in South Korea and in the United States. 

Ntšeliseng 'Masechele Khaketla (1918–2012)

Ntšeliseng 'Masechele Khaketla was a writer, poet, playwright, educator and translator from Lesotho. Though the appearance in 1954 of her debut creative work, the Sesotho-language play Mosali eo u 'neileng eena, made her the first published Mosotho woman playwright and probably even the first published sub-Saharan African woman playwright, Khaketla has not been widely represented in Western scholarship or collections of African writing. Her work includes several more plays, three poetry collections, a story collection, Mosiuoa Masilo, and a Sesotho-language translation of a 1971 English-language novel. In addition to her writing, Khaketla co-founded Lesotho's first private school, became the first woman appointed as a High Court assessor in Lesotho, and served on several government councils and commissions.

Her work is currently unavailable in translation beyond one excerpt of a poem (in the 1976 anthology The Other Voice: Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry in Translation and later in Margaret Busby's 1992 anthology, Daughters of Africa). However, the writer Makafane Tšepang Ntlamelle is currently seeking a publisher for his English-language translation of Mosiuoa Masilo.

First published in 1980, Mosiuoa Masilo charts the professional life of the titular Lesotho-born Mosiuoa Masilo first as a mine police officer, then as a WWII recruit, and finally a police sergeant, throughout the mid-to-late 20th century. Many of Masilo's experiences in the mines and the African Auxiliary Pioneer Corps are related by Masilo to his co-worker, the also Lesotho-born Corporal Molise, during their breaks and slow moments at the station. Entwined with Masilo's stories are the pair's reflections on childhood and parenting, colonialism, reincarnation, and Lesotho's irredentist movements, among an array of riveting topics.

We can hope for wider access to the words of Ntšeliseng 'Masechele Khaketla in the near future! As she puts it: “There is a mystery in things to come.”4

Makafane Tšepang Ntlamelle contributed to this text.

Albertina Bertha (1880-1953)

Earlier this summer, we got an intriguing email from Erick, a reader in Brazil, suggesting a potential future Cita title. Exaltação, by Albertina Bertha de Lafayette Stockler, made major waves upon its publication in 1916 for, as Erick put it, “the honest way it expresses the feelings and desires of its protagonist, Ladice.” Though Bertha achieved both notoriety and great critical acclaim during her lifetime, public memory of her had faded until recently.

A new critical edition of Exaltação was published in Brazil in 2016. It was edited and introduced by scholar Anna Faedrich, who has worked to reintroduce Bertha to readers since discovering her work as a master's student. In a blog post for Fundação Biblioteca Nacional announcing the publication, Faedrich credited Bertha’s work and its “mystical, intimate tone” as paving the way for later and internationally-renowned writers like Lygia Fagundes da Silva Telles (1918-2022) and Clarice Lispector (1920-1977).

In the absence of biographical information in English, Faedrich generously shared the following:

Albertina Bertha was a writer from Rio de Janeiro active in the early twentieth century, known as a novelist, essayist, and contributor to the press. Her bold writing, both in form and content, explored erotic and libertarian themes, which drew conservative criticism. In her work, she challenged social taboos by addressing female pleasure and the moral hypocrisy of her time, while also innovating stylistically to explore the inner lives of her characters.

Readers of Portuguese can learn much more through Anna Faedrich’s master’s thesis, this open access article by her on Nietzsche’s influence on Bertha, and through the critical edition of the book. Since publication of that volume, Bertha’s work has entered the public domain in Brazil, and at least one new edition of Exaltação has come out in Portuguese.

Meanwhile, Erick has added Exaltação to Wikisource. It is out of copyright and awaits translators! 

Further Exploration

To read:

• Though Albertina Bertha’s work is not yet available in English, an important work by her friend Julia Lopes de Almeida is—in an open access edition! The Bankruptcy (A Falência) was originally published in 1901 and “introduces readers to a turbulent period in Brazilian history seething with new ideas about democracy, women’s emancipation, and the role of religion in society.” The award-winning translation by Cintia Kozonoi Vezzani and Jason Rhys Parry (edited by Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva) was published by UCL Press in 2023.

• Makafane recommends “The Fish Market” by Esther Karin Mngodo, translated from Swahili by Jay Boss Rubin (available in both languages at The Common). Mngodo lives in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In addition to her award-winning work as a writer, she is the founder and publisher of UMBU, an online literary journal for women who write in Swahili.

• For a dive into the history of language, literature, and translation, and an analysis of a novelist’s thoughts the modern role of the English language on all of this, check out The Fall of Language in the Age of English (日本語が亡びるとき 英語の世紀の中で, Nihongo ga Horobiru Toki: Eigo no Seiki no Naka de, 2008), translated from Japanese by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter (2015). Columbia University Press has made an excerpt and the translators’ introduction available online.

• Past Women in Translation Month Bulletin issues:

  • "Give me your hand" / "Dame la mano": Gabriela Mistral by way of Langston Hughes, Ursula K. Le Guin, & Samuel Beckett; Soledad Acosta de Samper, Clarice Lispector, & Antonieta de Barros, August 2024.

  • "The deep sea where ideas swim": A brief overview of WIT Month, highlights of women writers who were also translators (Aphra Behn, George Eliot, Simin Dāneshvar, Alejandra Pizarnik), August 2023.

To look:

• Google Arts & Culture hosts a digital gallery with some of Na Hye-sŏk’s paintings.

To watch:

We got a lot of eyeballs on our social media this month thanks to this (now-viral?) clip of Anne Carson talking about translation in 2001. You can find the sources for the things we post on Are.na; here are the three translation discussions we pulled from this month:

• Anne Carson in discussion with Brighde Mullin for the Lannan Foundation, 2001.

• “Translation, Women, & Italian Literature: The Life and Work of Natalia Ginzburg,” a panel featuring Jhumpa Lahiri, Jenny McPhee, Ann Goldstein, Giovanna Calvino, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz in 2017.

• “Writing Between Languages and Cultures: A Reading and Conversation with Yoko Tawada,” moderated by Anna Zielinska-Elliott and Peter Schwartz in 2014 at Boston University.

Cita IRL

On Sunday, September 28, join a curated spread of small presses and literary magazines—including Cita Press!— for the Litquake Book Fair in Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, in association with Yerba Buena Gardens Festival. Book chats, poetry readings, and live music all day. Come see us!

—

While I’m gone, white mother, kill the fattened oxen
And feed your dear ones well, prime meat and curds
Overspilling so the dogs too lap the juice,
And still enough is left to throw a surplus
To your close kin across the seas.

And you, black mother, hold on firm—
There is a mystery in things to come
And a fierce look lights behind your eyes.
As the world-ball turns around and round
The feeing partridge finds the forbidden grain. 

The eleventh stanza from "Molelekeng,” a poem from the collection 'Mantsopa by Ntšeliseng 'Masechele Khaketla. Translated from Sesotho by Jack Cope and Dr. Dan Kunene; published as “The White and the Black” in The Other Voice: Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry in Translation (1976). Here is the original Sesotho text, sourced by Makafane from Dr. Daniel Kunene’s discussion 1984 issue of Concerning Poetry (Western Washington State University):

    U sale u li hlaba, u li ja, 'Malesehlana,
    Maqoqolo a tlēketse mafura, a je seoma,
    Ntja li qaphe moro ka lapeng la hau,
    Khōla u e betle, u e fofise maoatle,
    Bahaeno ba fumane ntho'a ho momona.
    Tšoara u tiise, 'Mamotšoanyane,
    Litaba ke masirela, ha li ke li qaqa,
    E ka 'n'a ba u ikhòtetse leihlo,
    Lefatše la 'mamolikoa-likoane-tjekeletsa,
    Motebela-khoale o e lelekela liselong.

“What I try and do in my talks [with students] is rouse them so that each one discovers his language. Not necessarily so that they’ll love Latin-American literature, or even reading, although I really insist that the act of reading belongs to every individual, and that if our society gives it a little attention, it is still a pleasure to which we all have a right. I emphasize at every opportunity that in the act of reading there is a freedom that isn’t present in other activities.

What I want to stress is language as a right to being. Not to learn it in order to speak “beautifully” in the style of lawyers with their farragoes of rhetoric, who become real acrobats of meaninglessness. But language as a tool to animate our social customs, our history, our goings-on.”

— “From The Hidden Language,” María Luisa Puga, tr. Annette Cowart and Reginald Gibbons. New Writing from Mexico. Special issue of TriQuarterly (Fall 1992). Adapted from Itinerario de palabras (1987, with Mónica Mansour).

In early 2024, we put out a call for a literary translator to work with us on the Cita Press Literary Translation & Technology project. As a bilingual, open access, and feminist press, we had big questions about the application of machine translation tools when it came to literary translation. These questions were sparked by the claims of companies marketing these tools and the relative scarcity of translations—especially open-licensed translations—of older texts by women. They were also informed by our understanding of literary translation as an essential but often under-recognized (and under-compensated) art form. The scope of these questions goes beyond the reach of one small press and library, of course. But if, as María Luisa Puga puts it, we see “language as a right to being”—and Cita’s mission to make literature by women accessible as part of that right — it felt important to not avoid these questions, either.

For the project, Mexican writer and translator Daniel Saldaña París translated Ten Days in a Mad-House, journalist Nellie Bly’s account of her time undercover at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island. In the process, he experimented with LLMs, comparing algorithmically-informed choices with his own aesthetic and political considerations. You can now read his reflections in the essay “Translation, AI and the Political Weight of Words,” translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, via Asymptote’s July Special Feature: “What AI Can’t Do.” The feature includes MacSweeney’s translator’s note as well as audio of Saldaña París reading from the essay in the original Spanish.

Diez días en un manicomio, the first book-length translation created specifically for Cita Press, is now available to read on our website (downloadable versions coming soon). As with our English-language edition of Ten Days, the book features illustrations by Dajia Zhou adapted from the original 1887 publication and a foreword by Mikita Brottman.

To celebrate the new translation, and to share a peek behind the scenes of the project that fueled it, we asked Daniel Saldaña París to answer some questions for us. You can find the interview below, along with updates on all the contributors we worked with on this book. And, as we enter Women in Translation Month, we populate the Cita Canon with new entrants suggested by Daniel and Christina.

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An Interview with Daniel Saldaña París

What initially drew you to Cita’s Literary Translation and Technology Project? What questions did you enter into the work with?

I was drawn to Cita’s mission. The idea of working with a feminist press focused on public domain texts was immediately appealing. I usually translate contemporary authors, so this felt like an exciting opportunity to engage with an older work, with all the challenges and rewards that entails.

I approach translation as a process of learning, and I was curious about what I might discover in a text written 138 years ago. I also came into the project with many questions about the role AI tools might play in literary translation. Like many, I had casually experimented with LLMs, but this was my first time engaging them in a sustained and critical way—trying to understand both their potential and their limits.

How did working on this project challenge or confirm your assumptions about the impact of AI tools on the practice of literary translation?

The experience deepened my understanding of what AI can—and cannot—offer a literary translator. I’ll admit I shared the initial anxiety many of us felt about these tools threatening our livelihoods. But this project helped clarify that the role of the translator remains irreplaceable. Some AI tools can be helpful under specific conditions, but they also raise serious ethical and political questions. Working with them in this context helped me see those complexities more clearly.

What made you choose Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House as a focus for this project?

I was struck by the book’s freshness and originality. Even though the discourse around mental health has evolved enormously over the past 138 years, Bly’s style of investigative journalism still feels urgent and relevant. The book reveals some of the foundations of the genre, and reading it helps explain the paths journalism would later take.

“I’m a better translator than any LLM precisely because I haven’t read millions of books…”

In the essay “Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words,” you talk about how translating Ten Days in a Mad-House surfaced connections with works from other time periods/genres/places, such as Cristina Rivera Garza’s 1999 novel Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry; trans. Andrew Hurley) and the choreography of Mary Wigman (1886-1973). How do these kinds of dialogues feed your creative process? Do they influence the kinds of projects you take on next?

Absolutely. A translator is only as good as their readings and their ability to make connections across time, genre, and geography. I often say that I’m a better translator than any LLM precisely because I haven’t read millions of books: I’ve read a smaller, more curated group of works that have shaped my sensibility. That personal taste, that sedimented reading history, plays a central role in the kinds of projects I take on and how I approach them.

You have a fair amount of experience in translating works from the public domain, including books with a feminist perspective. In your essay, you talk about the challenges for the translator when it comes to contemporary approaches to older texts. Do you have any advice for readers when it comes to reading new translations of older works?

I think readers should expect a translation—regardless of when the original was written—to speak meaningfully to the present. Language is always evolving, so when I translate into Spanish, I aim for the living, breathing Spanish I hear around me. That said, readers of public domain texts should also be attuned to the historical context and vocabulary of the time. I’d encourage readers to stay open, and to allow the text to resonate today while also offering a window into the past.

As an author, you’ve worked with translator Christina MacSweeney on your two most recent books to be translated into English. For the Cita project, you were primarily working as a translator, and then you saw your own writing on the experience translated by someone with whom you’ve worked closely. Did anything about these shifting roles in one project surprise you, as a translator and/or as a writer?

Yes, it was a new experience for me. I usually keep my work as an author and as a translator separate, so it was fascinating to have those roles overlap within a single project. One of the most rewarding aspects was receiving feedback on my essay from Christina—someone I deeply admire, and who, interestingly, has never worked with AI tools herself. We had a rich and thoughtful conversation about the implications of these technologies for our field.

This August marks over a decade of celebrating Women in Translation Month. Who are some women writers of the past you’d like to see translated from Spanish to English, and/or English to Spanish?

Someone should translate María Luisa Puga’s Pánico o peligro into English: it’s one of the best novels ever written about Mexico City. I’d also love to see a new, more widely available translation of Josefina Vicens’ El libro vacío. Going the other direction, we need fresh translations into Spanish of Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes. Their works deserve to be read anew.

From Christina MacSweeney: Translation of works by Latin American women has seen a rise in the last decade, but I'd love to see a collection of Pita Amor's poetry (and a biography of her wonderfully eccentric life) and in contemporary fiction, there's a great collection of short stories by the Argentinian writer Valeria Tentoni that I feel should appear in English: Furia diamante.

On Diez días Contributors

Daniel Saldaña París is a Mexican writer based in New York and Mexico City. He is the author of the essay collection Aviones sobrevolando un monstruo (Planes Flying Over a Monster; Catapult, 2024) and the novels En medio de extrañas víctimas (Among Strange Victims; Coffee House Press, 2015) and El nervio principal (Ramifications; Charco Press, 2020). In 2017 he was named in the Bogota39 list of best Latin American writers under forty.

Saldaña París’ latest novel, and his latest book to be translated to English is El baile y el incendio (The Dance and the Fire; Catapult), translated by Christina MacSweeney and now published as of this past Wednesday! The Dance and the Fire follows three old friends reconnecting amidst catastrophic wildfires; one character becomes immersed in a project inspired by the work of German expressionist choreographer Mary Wigman. The research for this novel in turn influenced the Diez días translation, as referenced in “Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words.”

Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning translator of Latin American literature. She has worked with such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, and Jazmina Barrera. Her co-translation (with Philip Zimmerman) of Aviones sobrevolando un monstruo (Planes Flying Over a Monster; Catapult, 2024) by Daniel Saldaña París was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and her translation of the author’s story “Rosaura at Dawn” has been included in the 2025 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction. She also translated Saldaña París’ latest novel, El baile y el incendio (The Dance and the Fire; Catapult, July 2025).

Queen of Swords, MacSweeney’s translation of Jazmina Barrera's hybrid biography of Elena Garro (La reina de espadas), will be published by Two Lines Press this November. Autobiography of Cotton, her translation of Autobiographía del algodón by Cristina Rivera Garza, is out in February 2026. MacSweeney is also currently co-translating, with Julián Herbert, Está haciendo tarde by José Agustín for New Pony Press and is translating a collection of short stories, Terrestrial (Terrestre), by Cristina Rivera Garza for Random House.

Mikita Brottman, who wrote the foreword for Ten Days in a Mad-House (which has been translated to Spanish by Daniel Saldaña París), is an author, psychoanalyst, and professor of literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She is the author of over a dozen books spanning genre and topic and has been called “one of today’s finest practitioners of nonfiction” (The New York Times Book Review). Her latest is Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida (Simon & Schuster, 2024).

Dajia Zhou is an illustrator, cartoonist, and visual designer. Her work includes illustrations, event posters, book covers, and comics, and 2D animations.

See the May 2024 Cita Press Bulletin for more from Mikita and Dajia, and on the English edition of Ten Days in a Mad-House.

Further Exploration

• Asymptote Journal’s July 2025 issue, with the special feature “What AI Can’t Do.”

• La Castañeda Insane Asylum: Narratives of Pain in Modern Mexico by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Laura Kanost (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020). Made available via the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot.

• The Language of Dance by Mary Wigman (Wesleyan University Press, 1966). Part of the NEH/Mellon Open Books Program.

• fragment 4, Mary Wigman, Hexentanz, composed 1914; recorded circa 1930.

• “Breathing Life into Language: The Collaborations of Christina MacSweeney,” by Nathan Scott McNamara for Los Angeles Review of Books.

• “The Annotated Nightstand: What Daniel Saldaña Paris is Reading Now, and Next,” at Literary Hub.

Cita Canon Spotlight

This month we celebrate three writers whose art and legacy calls for wider translation, as recommended by Daniel Saldaña París and Christina MacSweeney. Next month, we’ll continue the Women in Translation theme, so please write to us (info@citapress.org) if there is someone you think we should highlight!

Before she published her first novel at age 47, Josefina Vicens (1911-1988) had built an influential political career that included leadership positions in organizations and political parties related to agricultural workers’ rights and social justice in Mexico. She began writing about political issues in the late 1930s before transitioning to screenplays. El libro vacío (The Empty Book) was published to much surprise and acclaim in 1958, eventually winning the prestigious Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, a Mexican literary award judged by past winners. A meditation on the difficulty of writing, El libro vacío is considered Mexico’s first “metanovel.” Her second and final novel, Los años falsos, wasn’t published until 1982, but it too made a major impact on Mexican literature. As translator and writer Lacey Pipkin explains in Asymptote, it is hard to access the existing English translations of either novel, despite their influence. In fact, even the Spanish-language versions were scarce until a reprint in 2019. Pipkin observes: “In reading them, I grew more and more astonished that Vicens’s lucid, restrained prose exploring the anguished inner worlds of men at odds with their public selves is not more widely read.” [“Josefina Vicens’ Empty Books” by Lacey Pipkin, for Asymptote]

María Luisa Puga (1944-2004) was a Mexican novelist and diarist. As a young woman, she spent ten years traveling and living abroad, with significant stints in London, Paris, Rome and Nairobi. This period would have a lasting influence on her writing. Her first novel, Las posibilidades del odio (1978), interrogates the legacies of colonialism in Nairobi. Her third novel Pánico o peligro (1983) won the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia. Her last novel, Diario del dolor (2004), was about living with pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis. She ultimately published 11 novels, four short story collections, many works of nonfiction, and four children’s books. Puga traveled around Mexico as a lecturer and workshop leader for participants of all ages, chronicling these experiences in published writing (including the translated excerpt quoted at the start of this issue). She always kept a diary, and often returned to earlier notebooks make revisions; many of her books grew out the reflections in her personal writing. After her death from cancer, her family donated her papers—including 327 personal journals—to the University of Texas at Austin. At this time, none of her book-length works have been translated into English. [“María Luisa Puga: A Life in Diaries” by José Montolongo, from Portal]

Last month, Cita highlighted Sappho, who Plato called ‘the tenth muse;’ this month, we celebrate writer, poet, icon Pita Amor (Guadalupe Teresa Amor Schmidtlein, 1918-2000), who has been named la undécima musa (the eleventh muse). The youngest of seven children and sister of Carolina and Inés Amor, the founder of La Prensa Médica Mexicana and director of the Galería de Arte Mexicano respectively, Pita grew up as a privileged child with a knack for both mischief and literature. Her niece, Elena Poniatowska, writes of her after her death, “As a girl growing up in the house on Abraham González Street, she never learned what her sisters knew to perfection: good manners…the only surrender she ever consummated was to herself.” While the public would demonize her over scandals from her personal life, the brilliance of her work which sought to “talk about God, about anguish, about death” would transcend any public concerns, installing Amor as a mythic icon of poetry in Mexico. Her first book, Yo soy mi casa (I am my home, 1946), discusses her upbringing and social position. Her next twelve volumes of poetry are verses written in classic traditional form. When Amor published Sirviéndole a Dios de hoguera (Serving as a bonfire to God, 1958), there were rumors that five-time Nobel nominee Alfonso Reyes had written the work for her. Reyes himself praised the work, telling Amor that she had “grabbed the nucleus of poetry.” Amor became a mother at the age of 38; her son, who had been adopted by her sister, died at the age of just one and a half. It would be a decade until Amor returned to the public stage, beginning to write and recite again, but rebuking any questions about her personal life. Poniatowska writes, “Pita Amor sang to God and she herself was God.” Despite her fame and literary stature, her voice has not yet reached English ears. Now we ask of her: “Dear God, don’t delay, or, do you want me to go to you myself?” Spanish to English translations by Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez.1 [“Guadalupe Amor: Popular, Outrageous Mexican Poet” from the LA Times Archives, 2000]

What Else?

• On July 26, Cita editorial director Jessi Haley facilitated a round table event at The Sitting Room Library in Penngrove, CA. “Exploring Asian American Women Writers” used the legacy of Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton as a jumping off point for engaging with books and archival materials from a range of authors from TSRL’s collection. You can find a list of books and links to related materials at this link.

• More IRL Bay Area news: we’ll be at Litquake 2025! We’re exhibiting at the Book Fair (9/28) and participating in a panel (10/14), so keep an eye here and on the forthcoming Festival Schedule for details.

From “Décimas a Dios” by Pita Amor:

Dios, invención admirable,

hecha de ansiedad humana

y de esencia tan arcana

que se vuelve impenetrable.

¿Por qué no eres tú palpable

para el soberbio que vio?

¿Por qué me dices que no

cuando te pido que vengas?

Dios mío, no te detengas,

o ¿quieres que vaya yo?

-

God, the admirable invention

created out of human anxiety

and from such arcane essence

that it becomes impenetrable.

Why are you not palpable

to the arrogant who saw you?

Why do you tell me no

when I now ask you to come?

Dear God, don’t delay,

or, do you want me to go to you myself?

(translated by Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez)

someone will remember us 
I say 
even in another time

—Sappho, Fragment 147, translated by Anne Carson in If Not, Winter (2002)

In October 1985, Audre Lorde was in Michigan attending a conference on “The Black Woman Writer and the Diaspora.” She had been diagnosed with cancer for the second time a little over a year earlier, just before her fiftieth birthday. Writing in her journal, excerpts from which she would later publish as A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer (1988), she recounts a talk she gave to conference attendees she titled “Sisterhood and Survival.” She opened by introducing herself as a “Black Feminist Lesbian poet” which, she explains in her diary, “felt unsafe, which is probably why I had to do it…if there was one other Black Feminist Lesbian poet in isolation somewhere within the reach of my voice, I wanted her to know she was not alone.”

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Knowing that one is not alone is key to Lorde’s concept of survival; it is difficult for a person and their work to endure without a network of meaningful relationships. The idea of personal survival was urgent to Lorde whom, having run into several peers in the lead up to the conference, was feeling buoyed by the excitement of forming connections yet alienated by some reactions to the visible change in her health.1 So it makes sense that her thoughts turned to lineage—the relationships that sustain us while we live and that keep our legacies alive. She writes:

I think a lot about Angelina Weld Grimké, a Black Lesbian poet of the Harlem Renaissance who is never identified as such, when she is mentioned at all, although the work of Gloria Hull and Erlene Stetson recently has focused renewed attention upon her. But I never even knew her name when I was going to school, and later, she was the briefest of mentions in a list of “other” Harlem Renaissance writers.

I often think of Angelina Weld Grimké dying alone in an apartment in New York City in 1958 while I was a young Black Lesbian struggling in isolation at Hunter College, and I think of what it could have meant in terms of sisterhood and survival for each one of us to have known of the other’s existence: for me to have had her words and her wisdom, and for her to have known I needed them!

Angelina Weld Grimké is often noted for the early anti-lynching play Rachel (1916), and her poetry is in landmark anthologies like The New Negro (1925) and Caroling Dusk (1927). However, most of the poems she wrote were never published in her lifetime. In the 1987 study Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Akasha (Gloria) Hull asserts that the realities of being a queer woman in early twentieth century America were largely responsible for the size of Grimké’s bibliography. “Because of psychic and artistic restraints, the ‘lines she did not dare’ went almost as unwritten as they went unspoken,” Hull explains. When writing for herself, without self-censorship, Grimké produced work she could not safely share. When writing for an audience, she was “chained between the real experience and the conventions that would not give her voice.”

But, luckily for all of us, Grimké’s unpublished poems did not disappear, and we can now read many of them.2 They express longing, heartbreak, and daydreams rooted in the poet’s personal experiences and feelings. One unpublished poem, titled “Rosalie” or “Rosabel” contains the source for Hull’s “lines she did not dare” reference:3

 I

Leaves that whisper whisper ever,
       Listen, listen, pray!
Birds that twitter twitter softly,
       Do not say me nay.
Winds that breathe about, upon her,
       (Lines I do not dare)
Whisper, turtle, breathe upon her
      That I find her fair.

II

Rose whose soul unfolds white petaled
        Touch her soul, use white
Rose whose thoughts unfold gold petaled
        Blossom in her sight
Rose whose heart unfolds, red petaled
          Prick her slow heart's stir;
Tell her white, gold, red my love is;
        And for her, — for her

From Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance by Akasha [Gloria T.] Hull. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1987.

In her journal, Lorde mourns the fact that she and Grimké could have actually known, and helped, one another while they lived in the same city. Lorde understood the power of this missed opportunity, having fostered long-term friendships with other Black and queer writers like Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Pat Parker, and Barbara Smith. Such relationships nourished these women’s lives and work, as demonstrated in both published and personal writing. Support wasn’t limited to professional and geographic proximity, of course. During the same time period chronicled in A Burst of Light, Lorde was spending lots of time in Berlin, teaching writing and literature and connecting with Black German women to explore identity, creativity, and belonging. In a 1983 letter to Parker, Lorde offered up a summary of the philosophy and scope of her approach to interrelation: “Whatever I have/know that is useful to you is yours.”4

Personal networks have always provided fertile ground for art and artful living. But beyond the potential of the present lies a different kind of network, one less dependent on time and space. It is possible to build a lineage that gives everyone access to the “words and wisdom” of people with whom they share feelings and ideas—that gives us a way of knowing each other. In the great expanse of feminist art and literature, this can start to look like a web stretching across centuries, identities, and experiences to widen our understanding of what life and art can be.

Audre Lorde died of cancer on November 17, 1992. Nearly a quarter century later, her fellow Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press co-founder Smith echoed and expanded upon these ideas in a panel for the National LGBTQ Task Force’s Creating Change conference:

We [have] to know our history and to know that we did not invent ourselves and that we are not alone…

Wherever you wish to start, there’s been a steady continuum of freedom fighters of all genders, sexual expressions, sexual orientations, races, classes…abilities/disabilities, ethnicities, religions…if you understand that you are in a continuum you do take heart— because what it means is that you have a lot of sisters, brothers, and others.

…You find that person back in some unbeknown century, in some other country, who spoke some other language and who defined themselves totally different from you. And yet, when it came right down to it..they stood up for freedom. So that's how you get through.

Cita Canon Spotlight

This month, we’ll formally induct two authors you have almost definitely heard of before this Bulletin along with two names you may not yet have encountered. Together they represent influence and interconnection across centuries. To a growing understanding of the continuum!

While we only have fragments by the woman Plato called “The Tenth Muse” (with the exception of one full poem), lines by Sappho (c. 630 – c. 570 BC) hit hard many centuries after composition. The poet from the Greek island of Lesbos has been known since antiquity for her lyric poetry, which was originally set to music. Most of what constitutes her biography comes from texts written long after her death, and many of those are based on readings that assume autobiographical elements in her verse. Some traditions claim she had a daughter, that she was exiled, that she died jumping from cliffs into the sea in response to her unrequited love for a man. The latter myth is part of a prolonged attempt to counter the impression of Sappho’s romantic attraction to other women—a reactionary campaign that led many translators to change the pronouns in her poems. Though she is the namesake of the modern terms “sapphic” and “lesbian,” the lack of concrete information about the real person of Sappho leaves the question of her sexuality debated among scholars. What ascends from any debate is the lasting power of her words, including those expressing longing, desire, and love. [“What We Know of Sappho” by Judith Schalansky; translated from German by Jackie Smith in The Paris Review.]

English novelist and poet Bryher (1894-1943) is not as famous as their* longtime lover, H.D. , but she had major influence as a writer, collaborator and patron who used a vast family fortune to support art and artists. Bryher and H.D. first connected in 1918 after Bryher sent H.D. the book they had written about a mutual friend, Amy Lowell; the two remained partners in unconventional life and art for decades. Bryher published the poetry collection Arrow Music in 1922; its themes reflected an interest in classical literature and Sappho. (H.D. was writing expansions and translations of Sappho fragments around the same time, while the two were vacationing on the Scilly islands—the source of Bryher’s chosen name.) After ending one marriage of convenience with Robert McAlmon in 1927, Bryher married Kenneth Macpherson, who was also one of H.D.’s lovers. The three lived and worked together, and Macpherson and Bryher adopted H.D.’s daughter, Perdita. As The Pool Group, they published Close Up magazine and made films that interrogated societal norms around race, gender, and sexuality. During WWII, Bryher organized the rescue of over 100 people from the Nazis. They eventually wrote many books, including acclaimed historical novels. Though they separated after the war, H.D. and Bryher met or wrote to each other every July 17, marking the anniversary of their meeting each year until H.D.’s death in 1961. [Bryher bio at Women in Cornwall; *following the example of this bio, she/they pronouns are used here.]

When Elsa Gidlow (1898-1954) was setting up land she had bought in the California redwoods as an “unintentional community” in the 1950s, she chose a name inspired by two women writers who defied conventions: Berkeley professor of Celtic lore Ella Young and Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights. By the time she founded that legendary bohemian enclave, Gidlow herself had already been dubbed a “poet-warrior” by Young. In her youth in Canada she co-founded and ran what is considered the first North American publication to address queer themes: the underground magazine Les Mouches Fantastiques; she then worked for the controversial Pearson’s Magazine. In 1923, she published On a Grey Thread, which is known as the first book of openly lesbian love poetry published in North America. She had long partnerships, first with Scottish golfer Violet "Tommy" Henry-Anderson and then with the Congolese-born activist Isabel Quallo, as well as many lovers. Her political activism and personal life drew the attention of California’s Un-American Activities Committee, but she remained undaunted. Elsa, I Come with My Songs: The Autobiography of Elsa Gidlow illuminates her uncompromising life and the people she shared it with. She celebrated her eightieth birthday with the publication of Sapphic Songs: Eighteen to Eighty, The Love Poetry of Elsa Gidlow. [“In Memoriam: Elsa Gidlow” by Celeste West for Feminist Studies]

Audre Lorde (1932-1992) is one of the most enduringly influential feminist writers and thinkers of the twentieth century—a necessary inclusion to any literary canon. Like Gidlow, she embraced the marriage of the role of “warrior” with that of “poet.” She was also, as we explored above, deeply invested in claiming her identity as a Black lesbian feminist, and in helping the next generation do the same on a global scale. In 1980, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press with Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Cherríe Moraga to combat systemic injustices in publishing. As a professor at various New York City universities, she helped establish early Black Studies classes and programs. Whether poetry or prose, her books— The Black Unicorn (1978), The Cancer Journals (1980) Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and beyond—are deeply alive in our present moment. Though you can find her image and quotes all over social media, to really benefit from her work one must return to her writing as often as possible. [“Audre Lorde” by Mariana Brandman for the National Women’s History Museum]

Further Exploration

To read:

• “rites of passage,” excerpt from Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (2024) by Alexis Pauline Gumbs via poets.org.

• “Strangers In The Village? On ‘Borderline’ And Belonging:” Ellie Jones on the 1930 film Borderline, created by The Pool Group (founded by H.D., Bryher, and Kenneth MacPherson) for Another Gaze.

• “H.D. and Bryher: a modernist love-story” by Susan McCabe for artcornwall.org, a pre-publication excerpt on Bryher, H.D. and Sappho from McCabe’s 2021 book.

• “Elsa Gidlow: Pioneering Poet and San Franciscan Sappho” by Mara West for Oxford’s Queer Studies Network blog.

To listen:

• “Audre Lorde: A Burst Of Light”: A 1993 radio program from Berkeley’s KPFA featuring Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, and more. From The Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia, American Archive of Public Broadcasting.

• Elsa Gidlow on lesbian identity, circa 1980, from the GLBT Historical Society.

To dig through:

• The Digital Audre Lorde Archive at Freie Universität Berlin.

• Rediscovering the Warrior-Poet: Finding Audre Lorde at the Library of Congress.

• The Elsa Gidlow Primary Source Set from the GLBT Historical Society (see the full digitized Elsa Gidlow collection at the Internet Archive, too!).5

• Bryher papers at the Archives at Yale: includes digitized letters from H.D., Freud, and others.

• We Are Everywhere: Lesbians in the Archive from Yale University Libraries, featuring Angelina Weld Grimké, Sapphic Blues, and more.

• HERESIES Magazine #3: Lesbian Art and Artists (Fall 1977), via the Internet Archive and in pdf here. Elsa Gidlow on Sappho and much more, plus lots of other treasures. (Thanks to J.J. Wilson for alerting us to this one!)

What Else?

• We’re thrilled to introduce our new editorial intern, Ethan Werner! Ethan holds an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and has previously written and edited for The Daily Illini. His scholarship focuses on digital culture and media accessibility. We’re grateful to the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities for funding this internship and making it possible.

• On Saturday, July 26, editorial director Jessi Haley will be facilitating a round table on Sui Sin Far and other Asian American women writers for The Sitting Room Library in Penngrove, CA. The event is free but seats are limited; learn more and RSVP here!

When discussing women writers from the past, marking “firsts” is an efficient way to place lesser-known names in a larger context. Depending on their background or interests, many people may not recognize the name “Lady Murasaki,” for example—but they can probably grasp the significance of “the world’s first novel.”1 It’s fun to highlight how many feats challenge the perception that contributions by women were late and few—and tracing this history has deep roots. From Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens and beyond, a simple inquiry—“Who did this before me? And before her?”—has inspired countless writers to imagine a future that not only acknowledges, but actively learns from, the work of feminist forebears.

There is also, of course, danger in leaning on “firsts” as a way of defining any writer’s worth. What is the value of tracking accomplishments in chronological order if a voice is heard but not listened to; if work is acknowledged but not engaged with? The promise of legacy—of being recognized in death if not in life—can be big or small consolation depending on the form it takes.

In “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” Edith Maude Eaton predicts how the passage of time might put a sheen on the struggles she endures as a half-white, half-Chinese woman writer during a time where racism and legal exclusion is the default. Published under Eaton’s pen name, Sui Sin Far, the 1909 essay lays out how her background, ambitions, and ideals shape the author’s personal and professional life. “I cheer myself with the thought that I am but a pioneer,” she explains, “A pioneer should glory in suffering.”

Sui Sin Far’s status as pioneer has been cemented in the century-plus since she claimed the title. Though she died in 1914, at just forty-nine, she left behind a significant body of work. Many point to Eaton’s story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) as the first book published in the United States by an author of Chinese heritage. Others have called her the “mother of Asian American literature.” Despite these lofty labels, she was also the named example of “unstudied, unread, unknown Asian Americans” for editors Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong in the preface to the 1991 edition of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. Though recognition is growing, it’s taken too long for Eaton’s legacy to reach the full glory her suffering earned her.

When putting together “The Divine Right of Learning,” the reading companion to Cita’s 2023 open access collection An Immortal Book: Selected Writings by Sui Sin Far, we asked a handful of scholars and writers about how they first encountered Eaton’s work. Mary Chapman, Cherrie Kwok, Victoria Namkung, and Anran Wang all found her in university classrooms, introductions that sparked years-long study across topics and disciplines. Recent conference programs have indicated a growing interest in her work within academia, and—given her work’s accessibility, humor, and still-timely concerns—it seems likely that this trend will continue to include more casual readers (and we hope our collection can help with this!). However, thinking about the relationship between Sui Sin Far’s fame as a “first” and actual engagement with her writing raises a larger question of how writers become studied, read, and known in the longer term, and how such engagement changes to reflect society’s interests.

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Who builds a legacy?

While an author lives, they are the primary steward for their own legacy. This depends most of all on their writing, of course, and then their ability to promote it and connect with champions—editors, publishers, journalists, fellow writers. After death, however, the shape of that legacy is out of their control. As we often see with women writers, even a prolific catalog from a bold voice can quickly fade to obscurity without institutions and gatekeepers invested in keeping it visible.

We first see coverage of Sui Sin Far as a literary figure when she is around thirty-five years old, over a decade into her writing career and a few years into using a variation of her pseudonym. In the November 1900 issue of Land of Sunshine, editor Charles Fletcher Lummis describes her like this: “So far as I know, the only Chinese woman in America who is writing fiction is the delicate little Sui Sin Fah, a 'discovery’ of this magazine three or four years ago.”

He moves on to her work:

Her stories in these pages have been widely copied; and while they lack somewhat of literary finish, they merit the attention they have attracted…They are all of Chinese characters in California or on the Pacific Coast; and they have an insight and sympathy which are probably unique. To others the alien Celestial is at best mere '‘literary material’; in these stories he (or she) is a human being.

Edith Eaton worked very hard to get her writing published, even moving across the country to land a book deal. The publication of Mrs. Spring Fragrance generated press, including an autobiographical feature in the Boston Daily Globe. But after her obituaries ran, it took sixty years for her name to pop up again. In 1974, the editors of Aiiieeeee! credited Sui Sin Far as “one of the first to speak for an Asian American sensibility that was neither Asian nor white American.” In “Fifty Years of Our Own Voice,” the introduction to the landmark anthology, they quote Lummis’ on her “probably unique” characters and note how she “accurately portrayed Chinatown’s bachelor society.” Still, the rest of their commentary makes it a bit unclear what exactly readers are meant to take away about the value of Eaton’s contributions. On top of that, she is not one of the three women whose actual work is included in the book.2

In a 1981 essay titled “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First Chinese-American Fictionist,” scholar S.E. Solberg echoes Lummis’ assessment of Eaton’s “literary finish” in blunter terms. “She was not a great writer…but her attempts deserve recognition.” Perhaps it was her “integrity” that made Eaton worthy of note, if not inclusion, in a collection like Aiiieeeee!3 But a decade later, the expanded version of the anthology (The Big Aiiieeeee!) clears up some of the ambivalence of the original, laying out more directly how the editors felt about Sui Sin Far’s sensibility. She was, as Frank Chin puts it, a “lone champion of the Chinese American real.” More significantly, the new anthology includes three of her works, thus letting her words speak for themselves.

It wasn’t until 1995 that Eaton’s writing got put back into circulation through a full book: Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, edited by Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks. Ling had published “Edith Eaton: Pioneer Chinamerican Writer and Feminist” in 1983, and White-Parks took her on as the subject for her doctoral research around that same time. 1995 also saw the publication of White-Parks’ Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography.

In the past thirty years, scholars like Dominika Ferens, Martha J. Cutter and Mary Chapman have greatly expanded our understanding of and access to Sui Sin Far’s writing, illuminating its scope, volume, and complexity. Chapman in particular has uncovered so many previously uncredited stories and essays that she has more than tripled the author’s known oeuvre. Her 2016 book Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton collects many of these writings, and its introduction argues for much deeper and wider consideration of how Eaton approaches gender, race, nationality, and genre.

Two Sisters, Two Legacies

A challenge to the claim that Sui Sin Far was the first Chinese American or Asian American author to publish a book comes from within the immediate Eaton family. Edith’s sister, Winnifred, published her first novel with Chicago-based publisher Rand McNally in 1899. Miss Numè of Japan: A Japanese Romance was credited to Onoto Watanna, the completely made-up, “Japanese-sounding” name Winnifred had been using since 1896. Winnifred experimented with various pseudonyms and published autobiographical writings anonymously, which Edith also did. But unlike her older sister, Winnifred did not acknowledge her Chinese heritage in her writing, instead obscuring it by omission, vague reference, or—in the years she wrote as Onoto Watanna—by assuming an entirely different ethnic identity altogether. Also unlike Edith, Winnifred lived into old age, published many books, and experienced a great deal of commercial success as a novelist and screenwriter during her lifetime.

We can’t know what Edith thought about her sister’s choices, or vice versa. There is no accessible archival material illuminating their relationship—no letters, diaries, etc. Though some suspect that Winnifred wrote a New York Times obituary claiming that Edith was half-Japanese (thus bolstering her own narrative), the way their professional personas bled into their private relationship is currently a mystery.4

Their published work, however, contains some clues. In “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio,” Edith explains how some who share her background may choose to “pass” in a similar way that Winnifred did:

The Americans, having for many years manifested a much higher regard for the Japanese than for the Chinese, several half Chinese young men and women, thinking to advance themselves, both in a social and business sense, pass as Japanese. They continue to be known as Eurasians; but a Japanese Eurasian does not appear in the same light as a Chinese Eurasian. The unfortunate Chinese Eurasians! Are not those who compel them to thus cringe more to be blamed than they?

Though the essay emphasizes the many ways Edith refuses to follow similar paths, the end of this passage directs the reader’s judgement quite clearly.

For her part, Winnifred gives some insight on how she viewed her older sister in the autobiographical novel Me: A Book of Remembrance, which was published anonymously in 1915 (the year after Edith died). While sitting on a park bench with a drunk suitor asleep in her lap, the protagonist finds herself reflecting on her many siblings, including:

….the eldest, a girl with more real talent than I…She is dead now, that dear big sister of mine, and a monument marks her grave in commemoration of work she did for my mother’s country.

In recent years, many scholars and critics have rejected the idea of Edith as the “good” sister (claiming her true heritage and advocating for Chinese immigrants when it was extremely unpopular, even dangerous, to do so) and Winnifred as the “bad” sister (fraudulent, exploitative) for more nuanced readings. In Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002), for example, Viet Thanh Nguyen examines how critics alternately assign ideas about resistance and accommodation to the work of both sisters, often in a way that tells us more about contemporary interests than the sisters’ own.

A Web of Relationships, Distinct Voices

Edith and Winnifred Eaton’s choices overlapped and diverged in startling ways; they both lived lives for which they had no previous model.5 Much remains to be explored here. Luckily for us, Mary Chapman is currently at work on a micro history of the entire Eaton family: a large and fascinating group of people whose personal histories and accomplishments reflect how individuals shape their own worlds from shared attachments and experiences.

To kick off the preface to her biography of Sui Sin Far, Annette White-Parks quotes Dionne Brand from a session the American Studies Conference in Toronto in 1989: “We are always talking about power relationships in society; facts are never objective. Meaning that—as writers—we must always be aware of where everyone is located and at what point in time.” Brand’s instruction to consider the particulars of a writers’ place and time (down to neighborhood, job, etc.) connects to the need to, as White-Parks puts it, “point out the uniqueness of each writer’s viewpoint.” This can be a balancing act, with big stakes; as the editors of Aiiieeeee! assert: “The question of point of view is only partially stylistic in minority writing. It has immediate and dramatic social and moral implications.” It is essential to go beyond recognizing work by someone like Sui Sin Far as a “gesture.”

In the excerpt from Diana Chang’s 1957 novel The Frontiers of Love in Aiiieeeee!, one encounters a thesis of sorts on how context and connections can obscure, but also form, a distinct sensibility. The protagonist, Sylvia, is playing peacemaker during a routine parental spat that stems from the family’s very specific circumstances. Her mother is a white American woman, her father is Chinese, and the family lives in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II. “Relationships were like pressures that pushed you in thirty-six directions of the compass,” she reflects. “But, as in a crowded streetcar, if you learned how to maintain your balance against all the weights, you might arrive at yourself.”

Cita Canon Spotlight

This month we’re highlighting two women whose work spanned literature and visual art.

The editors of Aiiieeeee! called Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo (1912-2001) “the first serious creative writing by an Asian American to hit the streets.” The graphic novel features 206 drawings Okubo made while incarcerated at the Tanforan Assembly Center in California and the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah. Considered the first published account of the Japanese internment camps “by one who was there,” Citizen 13660 takes its title from the number assigned to Okubo’s family unit. While at Topaz, Okubo was the art editor for Trek, a literary and arts magazine that featured the work of incredibly influential (and also, at the time, incarcerated) writers like Toshio Mori. Prior to Pearl Harbor, Okubo received an MFA from Berkeley and studied under Ferdinand Léger before taking work creating mosaics and murals under the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Arts Project. In 1944, a job with Fortune magazine helped secure her release from internment; from there she continued her work as a painter and illustrator. In 1984, Citizen 13660 was recognized with an American Book Award and in 2021 the Japanese American National Museum held an exhibit celebrating the book’s 75th anniversary. [Miné Okubo Collection at the Japanese American National Museum]

Diana Chang (1924-2009) was, according to Aiiieeeee!, “the only Chinese American writer to publish more than one book-length creative work to date” (as of 1974) and a “well-known poetess.” Though born in New York, she moved to Shanghai as a baby and lived there into early adulthood. Her 1957 novel The Frontiers of Love is considered the first novel by an American-born author of Chinese heritage. She went on to publish five more novels and four collections of poetry. She worked as an editor for several publishing houses, edited The American Pen, and taught at Barnard College. She was also a painter, exhibiting her work in solo and group shows. Though her career was long and robust, her books, poetry, and paintings seem quite hard to find—especially online. [“First Published Asian-American Novelist, and Poet: Diana Chang” by Katie Portante for Barnard Archives and Special Collections.]

Further Exploration

To read:

• An Immortal Book Selected Writings by Sui Sin Far — free online and available to order in paperback. Foreword by Victoria Namkung; cover by Shuhua Xiong. (More on the contributors in the October 2023 Cita Presss Bulletin.)

• “The Divine Right of Learning, a downloadable reading companion for An Immortal Book. (February 2024 Cita Press Bulletin).

  • Appendix A includes the full text of Charles Fletcher Lummis’ 1900 profile of Sui Sin Far.

  • Appendix B features reflections from Mary Chapman, Anran Wang, Cherrie Kwok, and Victoria Namkung.

To listen:

• Victoria Namkung on Sui Sin Far and a follow-up discussion with Victoria and Cita’s Juliana Castro Varón, from Lost Ladies of Lit.

• Mary Chapman on Winnifred Eaton and her novel Cattle, from Lost Ladies of Lit.

• “Falling Free,” a 1989 audio piece by Diana Chang preserved by New American Radio and Wave Farm.

To dig through:

• “Behind Aiiieeeee!” by Tara Fickle (an archive in progress).

• Topaz Japanese American Internment Camp Digital Collection at Utah State University (includes all three issues of Trek, for which Miné Okubo served as art editor).

• The Winnifred Eaton Archive (directed by Mary Chapman).

• Links, pdfs, images, digitized originals and more on our Are.na channel.

What Else?

• Making Space for What’s Next: Free Strategy Sessions from Educopia: Educopia, Cita’s fiscal sponsor, is offering free 30-minute Office Hours with members of their Consulting team from June 9–27, 2025. These sessions are designed for individuals and small teams working through questions about strategy, structure, sustainability, or change—especially in equity- and care-centered organizations. More details about the offering, who it’s for, what to expect, and consultants’ specific skills and interests are in this blog post. Click here to schedule a session. Questions? Reach out to consulting@educopia.org

Knowing What Desires We Have Had

Knowing what desires we have had (some flaring, beautiful
      ambitions), 
And have had to let go, 
And knowing what questions we have put off answering,
Slurring over them, always,
Seeing double, gladly,
(Fearful, unbigoted minds grasping at both sides of every 
       question),
It is not surprising, only regrettable that we should have come 
       to this.

And now we are too-far gone;
We have practiced too well a partial living.
From here, there is no recovery.

To the roomful of us, it seems always to have been this way: 
You, I, and the other, manifesting conversation,
Watching the gestures of talk.
We hear the silence, uneasily, 
Fearing the next pause may give us away. 

—Diana Chang, Poetry (November 1946)

Last April, we marked National Poetry Month with four short poems from four (long?) centuries. This year, we’ll stay in the public domain but go back only one century to present five very different poems from five very different poets who were all writing, publishing and living remarkable lives at the same time. As much as they vary in style and shape, these poems share a modern voice and urgency no less alive today than one hundred years ago.

Alfonsina Storni was one of the few Latin American women poets with an international readership at this time; “¿Y tú?…” appeared as “Running Water” in a 1925 issue of Poetry dedicated to Spanish-language modern poetry from the Americas. “The Black Finger” by Angelina Weld Grimké, “I Bring Her a Flower” by Sylvia Townsend Warner, “O Hell” by Mina Loy, and “Dunbar” by Anne Spencer were all published between 1920 and 1925, in journals and/or collections or anthologies. But each of these poets left behind many works that were not published during the authors’ lifetimes.

These women wrote poems in the midst of every kind of obstacle—personal, political, existential—often without much expectation of an audience to share them with. As Anne Spencer once explained in an interview: “You write because you can’t stop writing.”1 Sylvia Townsend Warner once joked to her publisher, “I intend to be a posthumous poet!”2 We can be their audience now; there is so much to explore in each poet’s work and life. This is just a sampling.

Five Poems, 1920-1925

“The Black Finger” by Angelina Weld Grimké

  I have just seen a most beautiful thing,
                     Slim and still,
              Against a gold, gold sky,
              A straight black cypress,
                     Sensitive,
                     Exquisite,
                     A black finger
                     Pointing upwards.
Why, beautiful still finger, are you black?
And why are you pointing upwards?

From The New Negro: An Interpretation, Edited by Alain Locke, Albert and Charles Boni (1925).

Angelina Weld Grimké’s private notebooks contained dozens of poems that never made it to print while she was alive. “The Black Finger,” however, was anthologized several times, marking an early and essential entry in the burgeoning catalog of Harlem Renaissance poetry. Like many of Grimké’s poems, it combines powerful imagery with clearly articulated human emotion.

“I Bring Her a Flower” by Sylvia Townsend Warner

SWEET faith
Such looks of quiet hath
That those on whom she's smiled
Lie down to sleep as easy as a child.

No night,
However dark, can fright
Them, no, nor day
To come, however bleak and fell, dismay.

But sound
Sleep they in prison-bound
As when at liberty.
And if they wake, they wake in charity;

Like her,
Who rousing at the jar
Of weary foot in the rain
Pitied the wakeful sentry for his pain.

Like her: Rosa Luxemburg

From The Espalier, Lincoln MacVeagh, The Dial Press (1925).

This poem from Townsend Warner’s first collection was written in honor of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), a revolutionary who co-led the German Communist Party until she was kidnapped and murdered by anti-communist Freikorps paramilitaries ordered by the government. Feminist magazine Lux, which publishes lots of writing about feminist authors of the past and present, is named after Luxemburg.

“O Hell” by Mina Loy

To clear the drifts of spring
Of our forbear’s excrements
And bury the subconscious archives
Under unaffected flowers

      Indeed—

Our person is a covered entrance to infinity
Choked with the tatters of tradition

Goddesses and Young Gods
Caress the sanctity of Adolescence
In the shaft of the sun.

From Contact, Edited by William Carlos Williams and Robert M. McAlmon (No. 1, December 1920). [Typos from original corrected]

Contact was an experimental magazine co-founded by poets William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon to promote the theory that poetry should reflect the poet’s direct experience and their interaction with the time and place from which they are writing. Loy’s poem, which calls for artists to reject tradition and create freely, was in the inaugural issue, which also featured work by Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, and more. McAlmon’s Contact Editions press published Loy’s first collection Lunar Baedecker [sic] in 1923.

“Running Water” / “¿Y tú?...” by Alfonsina Storni

Yes, I move, I live, I wander astray—
   Water running, intermingling, over the sands.
I know the passionate pleasure of motion;
   I taste the forests; I touch strange lands.

Yes, I move—perhaps I am seeking
   Storms, suns, dawns, a place to hide.
What are you doing here, pale and polished—
   You, the stone in the path of the tide?

—

Si, yo me muevo, vivo, me equivoco;
Agua que corre y se entremezcla, siento
El vértigo feroz del movimiento:
Huelo las selvas, tierra nueva toco.

Si, yo me muevo, voy buscando acaso
Soles, auroras, tempestad y olvido.
¿Qué haces allí misérrimo y pulido?
Eres la piedra a cuyo lado paso.

“Running Water” translated by Muna Lee, from Poetry (June 1925); ¿Y tú?... from Irremediablemente..., Cooperativa Editorial Limitada (1919).

The 1925 issue of Poetry presented work by “modernistas” across Latin America, translated from Spanish by Muna Lee. In an editor’s note titled “Pan-American Concord” Harriet Monroe asks the magazine’s readers to approach the poems with “friendly consideration, emphasized by the realization that any translation of poetry…should always be read with the feeling of the veil in one's mind: one should try to look through it with an eye that intensifies the perceptible colors; one should listen through it with an ear that translates back the sound-effects and rhythm-effects of an alien language, and imagines what these would be in the poet's own tongue.”

“Dunbar” by Anne Spencer

Ah, how poets sing and die!
Make one song and Heaven takes it;
Have one heart and Beauty breaks it;
Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I—
Ah, how poets sing and die!

From The Book of American Negro Poetry, Edited by James Weldon Johnson, Harcourt, Brace, and Company (1922).

In the essential introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry, editor James Weldon Johnson muses on how, of the featured poets, only Paul Laurence Dunbar had achieved widespread literary fame at the time of publication. However, anyone reading the anthology would have to agree, he asserts, that “It is this side of prophecy to declare that the undeniable creative genius of the Negro is destined to make a distinctive and valuable contribution to American poetry.” Echoing Johnson’s prediction, Anne Spencer’s “Dunbar” draws a direct line from the brief lives and monumental legacies of English-language poets of the previous two centuries to the brief life and huge poetic legacy of Dunbar. And, though her speaker is presumably Dunbar himself, her “I” can suggest that she is claiming that legacy for her own future, and potentially for other Black women poets.

Cita Canon Spotlight

The poets featured this month all experienced some form of recognition during their lifetime, whether through inclusion in still-essential anthologies or in critical acclaim with small or wide circles. However, they all deserve wider legacies and expanded readership in this century.

As a poet, activist, educator, librarian, and gardener, Anne Spencer (1882-1975) knew how to nurture life and beauty. Spencer introduced herself to readers of the 1927 anthology Caroling Dusk in this way: “…I have no academic honors, nor lodge regalia…I write about some of the things I love. But have no civilized articulation for the things I hate. I proudly love being a Negro woman—it’s so involved and interesting. We are the PROBLEM—the great national game of TABOO.” Her wry humor, passion for language, and “cool precision” made her influence extend far beyond Edankraal, the studio her husband built for her in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her home is now in the National Register of Historic Places; her garden is the only restored garden of an African American figure. A new film, Earth, I Thank You: The Garden and Legacy of Anne Spencer, premieres this May at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. [The Anne Spencer House & Garden Museum; Anne Spencer: I am Here! at the University of Virginia Library.]

As evident in the above poem “O Hell,” Mina Loy (1882-1966) was ready to tear down old ways of thinking and build anew. Her tools of choice were poems, paintings, and experimental works such as 1914’s “Feminist Manifesto.” She was a divisive and fascinating figure to her peers, her radical poems sparking admiration and confusion from others in the Modernist poetry scene. Her life was marked by several personal tragedies, as well as adventures across several countries, intellectual exploration, and friendships with many fellow artists and thinkers. [Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable at Bowdoin College; Mina Loy — Navigating the Avant-Garde.]

“Much of the meaning of Angelina Weld Grimké’s [1880-1958] life was set even before she was born,” Akasha Gloria Hull wrote in a 1979 essay for the magazine Conditions. After coming into this world with a family history that reflected the deepest, most complicated pains of a country and its past, Grimké navigated dark realities through poetry, plays, stories, and essays. She is often remembered for the play Rachel, one of the earliest anti-lynching plays; it was first performed in Washington, D.C. in 1916 followed by a historic run in New York City at the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1917. In addition to works that appeared in important journals and anthologies of the Harlem Renaissance, Grimké wrote dozens of poems that went unpublished during her life, including love poems that grappled with queer longing and identity. Black feminists like Hull and Audre Lorde rediscovered and wrote about Grimké in the 1970s/1980s; as of 2025 her work has not been brought together in a collection. [“Angela Weld Grimké and Archival Rediscovery” from We Are Everywhere: Lesbians in the Archive at Yale University Libraries.]

Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938) was an Argentinian poet, fiction writer, and playwright known for the eroticism of her poems and her bold feminist themes. She was one of the first Argentinian women writers to find commercial and critical success. Her third collection, Languidez (Languor 1920), won the first Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize. She formed close friendships with many other writers, including Chilean poet Gabriel Mistral (a future Nobel Prize winner) and Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou. [“Alfonsina Storni: The Poetess that Broke from the Pack”by Kate Bowen for The Argentina Independent; Alfonsina Storni at Discography of American Historical Recordings.]

Though her literary career began with poetry, Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) is better known for novels like Lolly Willowes (1926). Her fiction was one of the early revival focuses of Virago Press, with Mr Fortune’s Maggot and The True Heart included in the first five books in the Virago Modern Classics series. The last poetry collection published during her lifetime, Whether a Dove or Seagull (1934), was a joint effort with her partner, Valentine Ackland. It was received with dismissal and confusion from critics, who focused on the poets’ decision to obscure specific authorship attribution and avoided engaging with the poems’ lesbian undertones. All of Warner’s work—poetry and prose—was concerned with what she called “the oddness of the world and the surprisingness of mankind.” As late Virago founder Carmen Callil instructed in 2016: “Read everything she wrote and have a most happy life.” [The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society]

What Else?

• Angelina Weld Grimké was a regular at Georgia Douglas Johnson’s S Street Salon, the subject of February’s Bulletin. Anne Spencer also hosted a literary salon in her home, welcoming many of the same figures who attended the S Street Salon.

• Much of the influential feminist poetry of the 1920s and earlier was written in languages other than English, and translations of these important works can remain hard to find.

  • Read our August 2024 Bulletin about the translation history of Chilean Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral, whose first collection came out in 1922.

  • Share your “translation wishlists” with us in the comments and we’ll share them this August for Women in Translation Month. For example, we would love more visible and accessible translation of poems by Bing Xin, Lin Huiyin, Juana de Ibarbourou, and more.

• Bay Area book friends can catch us at the Santa Rosa Zine Fest on May 3! The event is free and outside. Join us at the Sonoma County Library, North West Branch for free mini-zines, bookmarks, and book chats between 1 and 5 pm.

• We had a great time connecting with people in person at the Other Islands Book Fair in Brooklyn earlier this month. Thank you to the organizers and to Pratt’s Graduate Communications Design program!

In “Woman Born of Man,” a 1963 speech to university students in Florida, writer Lillian Smith reflects on her generation’s youthful attitude towards women’s suffrage activists: 1

“…though we still couldn’t vote we had acquired a great many little privileges and rights: we could wear bloomers in gym classes; we could wear divided skirts when riding horses, we did sneak a cigarette if we wanted to…We felt we were doing all right; and when we read about those women in the late and middle nineteenth century screaming for women’s rights, we sometimes laughed. What my generation did not know was how many important legal rights had been won by those screams: rights that have to do with property, with the right to get divorce, with the right to hold on to one’s money, etc. We were a little ashamed of those brave but rather noisy women who won for us such a nice handful of our civil rights. Of course, we don’t have all of them now; we have a great many.

And these women did this for us. Women whose names we do not easily remember.”

In the United States, the framing of Women's History Month often emphasizes a presidential proclamation that has been repeated each March since 1988. But legal recognition followed decades of global activism rooted in labor and social movements. This year, the annual proclamation and related messages from the government call for an erasure of history and degradation of the rights of specific groups of women and are therefore—willfully, of course—obscuring the point entirely.

In 1980, when President Jimmy Carter declared the first official Women’s History Week, he stated: “As Dr. Gerda Lerner has noted, 'Women's History is Women's Right.' It is an essential and indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long-range vision…Understanding the true history of our country will help us to comprehend the need for full equality under the law for all our people.”2 Today, there is a direct threat to work that fosters a deeper understanding of the past. But, as individuals, organizations, and communities, we do have access to resources that can help us engage with the true(r) history that shapes our present reality, no matter our gender. We can stay committed to using those tools and celebrating the pioneers of the past who gave them to us.

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Feminist Journals and Magazines, Digitized

In last March’s Bulletin, we looked at mainstream women’s magazines in the United States, inspired by a Women’s History Month event at the San Francisco Public Library. While magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping had vast reach in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, parallel feminist magazines challenged their messaging. These alternative publications may have had short runs or modest circulation in terms of numbers and geography, but they gave people a vehicle for sharing ideas that pushed far outside the limits of societal norms.

Some subjects earlier feminist magazines tackled may feel like things we can now take for granted, like Lillian Smith’s “bloomers in gym class.” But most remain highly relevant. Beyond specific issues, there is much to learn from how people reached out to each other through articles, editorials, letters, poems, stories, and design. Many libraries hold physical copies of rarer magazines (see the New York Public Library catalog for an amazing selection), and it’s becoming more and more possible to access such publications thanks to efforts to put them online and make them available to anyone, anywhere. Below is just a sampling of what is out there.

The Freewoman, from the Modernist Journals Project

The Modernist Journals Project has digitized copies of English-language journals from the 1890s to the 1920s, offering a collection that ranges from Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth to The Atlantic Monthly. This includes three publications shaped by Dora Marsden as editor: The Freewoman (1911-1912), The New Freewoman (1913), and The Egoist (1914-1919). Marsden founded The Freewoman after breaking from the suffrage organization Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU); she wanted the magazine to cover issues beyond voting rights and to delve into subjects rarely discussed in print, like sex work and birth control. Where The Freewoman looked at all aspects of life from a feminist lens, its successors moved away from an explicit feminist focus.

[The Freewoman Collection]

Urania, from the LSE Digital Library

The Women’s Library holds over 3,500 magazines and journals, including twenty-three issues of Urania dating from 1919 to 1940 that are available through the LSE Digital Library. Urania was founded in 1916 by five feminist activists: Eva Gore-Booth, Esther Roper, Irene Clyde, Dorothy Cornish, and Jessey Wade. While their other pursuits ranged from international law to animal rights to literature, the founders shared an aim to abolish the gender binary. The journal aggregated content from other publications alongside original poems, brief personal accounts, and articles about scientific research related to gender (including early gender confirmation surgeries). It was entirely self-published and privately circulated; interested “friends” subscribed or requested available back issues by writing directly to the editors.

[Urania Collection]

Fem, from UNAM’s Archivos Históricos del Feminismo

The Archivos Históricos del Feminismo project, hosted by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), has made all print issues of Mexican magazine Fem (1976-2005) accessible online and searchable by author, date, etc. Fem is one of the oldest and longest-running feminist magazines in Latin America. Its content includes poems, short stories, criticism, and a range of articles on social issues impacting women in Mexico and Latin America. It was founded by Alaíde Foppa, a poet-activist who lived in exile in Mexico and disappeared upon returning to Guatemala in 1980, and Margarita García Flores, a lawyer, activist and writer. Literary icon Elena Poniatowska was an early contributing editor.

[Fem Collection.]

Feminist Voices, from JSTOR

JSTOR has compiled a wide range of alternative magazines, newspapers, and journals from various library collections for the open access project Independent Voices. The Feminist section includes more than seventy-five publications from the 1960s and 1970s—an incredible concentration of second-wave feminist writing, art, and commentary. Many feature work by writers like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Nellie Wong, Tillie Olsen, Alejandra Piznarik, and more.

Some examples:

• Ain’t I a Woman?: Iowa Cita, Iowa

• Up from Under: New York City, New York

• 13th Moon: Albany, NY

• Country Women: Albion, California

• Big Mama Rag: Denver, Colorado

• The Lesbian Tide: Los Angeles, California

[Feminist, Independent Voices.]

From Archive to Art + Community

In a post for the LSE Review of Books blog, Jenny White explains how “the longstanding interconnections and solidarities between feminism, trans rights and sapphic lives” are reflected in the pages of Urania. One of Urania’s founders was Irene Clyde/Thomas Baty, whom today we might call transfeminine and/or nonbinary. In addition to their work with Urania, Clyde published Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), a utopian novel set in a genderless land, and Eve’s Sour Apples (1934), a collection of essays that pushed against gender stereotypes and societal expectations for women. [Cita’s post featuring Baty/Clyde and nine other pioneering trans/gender-nonconforming writers.]

Rebuilding Urania, an ongoing work by Irish visual artist Renèe Helèna Browne, demonstrates how digging into archival material—in this case, issues of Urania—for creative projects can foster present-day connection. What began as an “oral archiving project” has expanded to include drawings, soundscapes, murals, and a screening of the early films of Cheryl Dunye (director of The Watermelon Woman). The project has engaged contributors working across disciplines, “starting to build a community and friendships around ideas in the work.” [Clay AD on Renèe Helèna Browne's 'Rebuilding Urania'', for LUX Scotland.]

In addition to being the last day of Women’s History Month, today is International Transgender Day of Visibility. Organizations like the Digital Transgender Archive and Invisible Histories are working to make trans history more accessible, as are libraries, museums, and independent researchers around the world. The possibilities for what we can do with that accessibility as artists, writers, and creative communities are endless.

“My life would have been so much different if I had known a fraction of what we are discussing today about historical figures, particularly about how our experience has been erased culturally…what you call history is what I call childhood, but history and being able to excavate these pieces of evidence of people’s lives is vitally important.”

—Christine Burns, from “A Look into the Trans Archive,” a virtual event hosted by The British Library, 2021.

Print—>Web—>Kitchen

Bringing a recipe from the past to life in your kitchen may function as a form of culinary communing. But even if you don’t get in touch with any feminist forebears in the process, you’ll get to eat cake.

Malinda Russell was the author of A Domestic Cook Book (1866), the first published cookbook by an African American woman. It opens with an account of her life, her career, and her reasons for publishing the book. The brief narrative sheds some light on what life was like for a free Black woman of talent and experience working in the South during a tumultuous, momentous period of American history.

A pdf of the original is available to all via the Malinda Russell Recipe Testing Project. The group of culinary historians behind the project, which began as a lockdown-era endeavor, have adapted several recipes for modern kitchens and methods. “Our mission is to give life back to Malinda Russell’s fabulous recipes,” their site explains, “by working out all of the details, and then making this research available to anyone interested in the uniquely varied set of dessert recipes that she published in 1866.”

Below is a recipe that Cita editorial director Jessi Haley tried out, originally adapted by Mercy Ingraham (see this post for her version, with notes and historical context around lemon cakes in the United States).

Malinda Russell’s Lemon Cake

Originally adapted by Mercy Ingraham for The Malinda Russel Recipe Testing Project, notes from Jessi.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup unsalted butter

• 2.5 cups cane sugar

• 4 large eggs, separated

• 1 cup milk (I used almond milk and ~1 tablespoon of leftover heavy cream without issue)

• Zest and juice of ~1 lemon (I used 2 Meyer lemons)

• 4 cups all purpose flour

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

Instructions:

Assemble all the ingredients and allow them to come to room temperature.

Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Butter a 10” Bundt pan well. (This is a large cake, so you could probably cut the ingredients in half and use a 10” cake pan, but I haven’t tried that.)

Cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl, beating until light and fluffy.

In another bowl, beat the egg yolks well until light colored and mix into the butter/sugar mixture. Add the lemon juice and zest and beat to distribute evenly.

Add the milk into the batter and mix. (The batter looked slightly curdled at this point but it didn’t seem to be a problem.)

In a clean bowl with a clean whisk or whisk attachment, beat the egg whites until stiff and gently fold them into the batter with a spatula.

Mix the flour and baking soda together and sift into the batter, stirring well but gently after each addition. Mix just until you can no longer see any trace of the flour. (I used my stand mixer for this.)

Pour the batter into prepared pan and bake for 60 minutes in the preheated oven, until cake begins to pull away from the sides of the pan, springs back when touched in the center, and a toothpick comes out clean.

Allow to cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes; then unmold and continue to cool.

Serving Suggestion:

Mercy Ingraham recommends a light lemon glaze, with the suggestion to try Mrs. Russell’s Cold Icing from A Domestic Cook Book. That recipe calls for five egg whites and beating with “a silver spoon or wooden paddle” (you can see why the culinary historian’s adaptations are called for!). Since I had already used four eggs for the cake—and the situation with eggs is what it is—I made a simpler glaze that involved whisking the juice of one Meyer lemon with a scant cup of confectioner’s sugar. I drizzled it over the cake once it had cooled.

What Else?

• Celebrate the close of Women’s History Month by visiting our catalog at citapress.org and reading a book, printing a zine (maybe to give to a friend), or downloading a reading guide. And share this Bulletin with a friend!

• Register for an upcoming free online lectures series that aims to explore radical, community-centered, and non-Western approaches to technology. Presented by Futuress as part of their project “Unwired Currents—Imagining Technologies Otherwise.”

• Read about how metadata can be a tool—and a hindrance!—to preserving American women’s history at the Smithsonian. From Educopia’s own Rachel Mattson!

• Visit the National Gallery of Art (in person or online) to see the exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist. Learn more about Catlett via the National Museum of African American History.

• Explore the Cita Canon Spotlight archive to learn about women writers and artists you may or may not know, all of whom shaped the future of art, literature, and women’s rights.

  

  “This kind of realism is the realm of the creative writer: to show the invisible things actually present in contemporary life. This is one duty; one that we can commit ourselves to. Then we have another duty, another commitment to make. And that is to show it reflected against the future; and the past. Then we have a third commitment: to show these visible and invisible things as they look to each of us, in the dim depths of our own heart and mind, as they link on to what they find there.

  This is art as the writer deals with it.”

  —Lillian Smith, in a letter to Gerda Lerner from August 1961. Lerner had written to Smith for advice and affirmation as a writer. In 1979, Lerner chaired The Women's History Institute, which became instrumental in establishing Women’s History Month.

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Georgia Douglas Johnson was a Washington D.C. housewife with a background in music when she published her first book of poems, The Heart of a Woman , in 1918. The collection’s titular poem is a haunting portrait of a woman’s longing for freedom and possibility: “The heart of a woman falls back with the night, / And enters some alien cage in its plight, / And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars / While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.” Just a few years later, she turned her home into a space that nurtured the dreams of other women, while also becoming one of the most widely published Black woman writers of her time.

The Heart of a Woman, like Johnson’s 1922 collection Bronze, is dedicated to Johnson’s husband, Henry Lincoln Johnson—despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he didn’t approve of her literary pursuits. “Linc” was a prominent lawyer and politician; in 1910 they moved to D.C. after President William Howard Taft appointed him Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia. 1 After Linc died in 1925, Georgia worked hard to support their two sons on her own. She became a civil servant herself in 1925 when Calvin Coolidge named her a Commissioner of Conciliation for the Department of Labor, a position she held for nearly a decade.

The demands of being a federal employee and single mother did not quell Johnson’s literary output. In addition to poetry, she began to write plays and in 1926 she took on a syndicated newspaper column. Across over two dozen plays and hundreds of poems, she tackled racial violence, gender roles, reproductive rights, and more. In her column, “Homely Philosophy,” she shared her insights with a national audience, urging readers to trust themselves and embrace ambition: “There is magic in the expectant attitude,” she wrote, “and verily we attract that which we earnestly desire.”

Georgia Douglas Johnson’s earnest desires extended beyond ambitions for herself. She recognized the obstacles that she and other Black writers faced, but she believed in the power of literature as a vehicle for social change and of community to foster opportunity. So she opened her home at 1461 S Street, and what had been simply the center of the Johnson family’s domestic world widened to become the S Street Salon—the vibrant D.C. center of the Harlem Renaissance. Every Saturday, people would gather to read, share ideas, workshop, and debate art and politics. Johnson was an expert host, curating her guest lists to include a mix of unknown and famous creatives and organizing activities so participants could inspire and learn from each other. She also offered the “Half-Way House,” as she called it, to writers who needed a place to stay, whether they were visiting from out of town or struggling to make ends meet.

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While famous men like Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois were part of the scene, Johnson made sure that the S Street Salon was particularly nourishing for other women writers. Scholar Treva B. Lindsey describes the S Street Salon as providing “an African American women-centered counterpublic” that gave participants a place to focus on their work and share their voices.2 Zora Neale Hurston, then a student at Howard University, was a regular “Saturday nighter” who also often stayed with Johnson. Fiction writer and journalist Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a frequent participant. Groundbreaking plays by Angelina Weld Grimké, Mary Burrill, Marita Bonner, and Johnson herself were discussed and performed at the salon.

Some of the most important works of the 20th century came into being because of the community and connections Johnson facilitated in her home. Johnson and the S Street Salon regulars were deeply involved in anti-lynching activism, and the work they created was shared as part of the NAACP’s campaign to enact legislation on the federal and regional level. Many who attended “Saturday nighters” penned reviews of new works by Black writers and artists as well as general cultural criticism, shaping a critical arena attentive to the flourishing creative atmosphere.

Though regular Saturday nights at the S Street Salon ceased at the end of the 1920s, Georgia Douglas Johnson continued to host creative gatherings. In 1966, she died at age eighty-five, at the home she had shared with so many others. The long tail of her legacy, though not nearly as visible as it should be, reflects how Johnson’s work and ideas have resonated with Black feminist writers of later generations. Maya Angelou’s fourth memoir, The Heart of a Woman (1981), takes its name from Johnson’s debut collection. Later artistic collectives, such as the late-seventies writing group The Sisterhood, built on the S Street Salon’s model in creating space for material, creative, and professional support. Today, the house on the corner of 15th and S Streets is marked as part of the African American Heritage Trail.

Share My World, Georgia Douglas Johnson’s fourth poetry collection, was published in 1962. Like her first, her final book takes its name from an opening poem that lays out a clear statement about the author’s worldview—it also nearly directly references how she transformed her private world into a shared one through the S Street Salon. The collection also includes the poem “Your World,” a triumphant update that proves that the speaker of “The Heart of a Woman” finally broke free from the “sheltering bars” she felt around her decades earlier.

Your World

Your world is as big as you make it. 
I know, for I used to abide
In the narrowest nest in a corner, 
My wings pressing close to my side. 
 
But I sighted the distant horizon 
Where the skyline encircled the sea 
And I throbbed with a burning desire 
To travel this immensity. 
 
I battered the cordons around me 
And cradled my wings on the breeze, 
Then soared to the uttermost reaches 
With rapture, with power, with ease!

Cita Canon Spotlight

This month, alongside Georgia Douglas Johnson, we’re highlighting a key “Saturday nighter” and a contemporary who literally put Black cultural contributions on the map.

As a fiction writer, critic, poet, journalist, educator, and activist, Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) often defied convention. She published her first story collection, Violets and Other Tales, at age twenty, around the same time she got involved with the New Orleans chapter of the Phillis Wheatley Club and The Woman’s Era, the first national newspaper by and for Black women. An early marriage to famous poet Paul Laurence Dunbar created a complex set of conditions for Alice, who bravely left the abusive relationship but continued to nurture her husband’s legacy after his death in 1906. In creating her own legacy, Dunbar-Nelson worked tirelessly to write what and how she wanted, despite outside pressures. In addition to a wealth of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction (published and unpublished), she left behind a rich personal archive including diaries, letters, and more—providing rare insight into the private life of a queer Black woman artist in the early twentieth century. [“Feminize Your Canon: Alice Dunbar-Nelson” by Joanna Scotts, The Paris Review.]

Louise E. Jefferson (1908-2002) was an artist, illustrator, photographer, author, and cartographer. A founding member of the Harlem Artists Guild, Jefferson played a major role in shaping Black visual culture through her freelance work for publications and organizations like Opportunity, The Crisis, the NAACP, and more. In the 1940s, she rose to the position of Artistic Director at Friendship Press, making her the first Black woman art director in publishing. Though long recognized for her illustrations and design work on books like We Sing America (ordered to be burned by Georgia’s governor in 1936) and 1973’s The Decorative Arts of Africa, in recent years researchers have highlighted her groundbreaking contributions as a mapmaker. Through maps like Uprooted People of the U.S.A. (1945) and Americans of Negro Lineage (1946), Jefferson pioneered the tradition of “counter-mapping” — cartography that illuminates injustices and/or serves and affirms marginalized communities. [“Louise E. Jefferson – A Hidden African American Cartographer” by Iris Taylor, Library of Congress Blogs.]

Further exploration

• An exciting film project, Mother of the Renaissance: The Legacy of Georgia Douglas Johnson, is in development, shining a long-overdue spotlight on Johnson’s widely unknown Black cultural and literary achievements. As a pioneering poet, playwright, composer, and activist, Johnson played a pivotal role in shaping the Harlem Renaissance and Black Drama movements. The film delves into her groundbreaking contributions, including her S Street Salon, a vital creative hub that nurtured some of the era’s most influential Black writers and thought leaders. Director and Producer Shellée M. Haynesworth explains, “By bringing this space to life, we honor Johnson’s role as a cultural architect whose influence extended far beyond her writings and Washington, DC during Jim Crow in America.” Currently seeking funding, this documentary aims to reclaim Johnson’s legacy and ensure her profound impact is recognized.

  • Haynesworth is also the creator of Black Broadway on U: A Transmedia Project, which amplifies the stories of Washington, D.C.’s historic U Street community—also known as “Black Broadway.” Through various multimedia activations, the project has highlighted the literary writings and works of Georgia Douglas Johnson, along with other leading Black women literary artists of her S Street Salon, whose contributions were instrumental to the Harlem Renaissance and the early Black Drama movements. Explore the people and places of “The Great Black Way” via this interactive map.

• Listen to “I Want To Die While You Love Me” from composer Rosephanye Powell’s Miss Wheatley’s Garden project. The song cycle celebrates the influence of Phillis Wheatley Peters by setting to music poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimké, and Frances E.W. Harper. “I Want to Die While You Love Me” was read at Johnson’s funeral in 1966.

• The Emory Center for Digital Scholarship has made digital facsimiles and text available for twenty-two issues of The Woman’s Era —the first newspaper created by and for Black women.

• The excellent digital exhibit “I Am an American!” The Authorship and Activism of Alice Dunbar-Nelson will be back online next week via the Rosenbach Museum. Curated by Monet Lewis-Timmons and Jesse Erickson, it thoughtfully weaves together the many threads of Dunbar-Nelson’s personal and professional lives through the remarkable archive she left behind.

• On finding links across generations: “Black Women Building Their Own Archives, A Practice” by Dr. Monet Lewis-Timmons.

• From the Cita Press Instagram:

  • Eight Black Women in Design: Celebrating the work of Black women designers who shaped the look and feel of the twentieth century and beyond — with innovations in typography, maps, textile design, public art, and the many ways information is delivered visually.

  • Ten Important Texts in the Public Domain for Black History Month: A century and half of published writing by Black women in the US is in the public domain, meaning it is owned by the public and can be freely read, shared, and adapted into new work. No matter how much time separates us from the poems, plays, and prose of the past, we can find things we recognize—characters, ideas, dreams— in literature. We can all preserve, amplify, and build on these works.

    

    "I have been fortunate in having the friendship of all of you winged artists. It has been one of my blessings. Somehow all that I have missed in the big ways of the world with its fanfare of trumpets, have more than been compensated for through the fragrant friendships I have known."

    —Georgia Douglas Johnson in a ~1930 letter to Langston Hughes, via Kim Roberts for Beltway Poetry Quarterly

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As major novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928) have come out of copyright in the United States, Virginia Woolf has been a marquee figure on most “new to the public domain” lists for the past few years. The latest addition from Woolf’s catalog is A Room of One’s Own, a bestselling treatise on women and writing that has never gone out of print. Writers, organizations, publications, and book spaces have been adopting and adapting its title for decades. Many of the book’s passages are instantly recognizable (if often misquoted):

• “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

• “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman.”

• “I told you… that Shakespeare had a sister… She died young—alas, she never wrote a word.”

• “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

As of January 1, 2025, we all own the whole book.

The public domain expands by hundreds of books each year, but only a handful of entrants boast the kind of power this work has maintained across 95 years. The drawback to a book’s widespread literary fame, though, is that it can create the impression of knowing what it has to say, whether or not you’ve actually read it.

Reading the famous quotations from A Room of One’s Own in context deepens our understanding of why this text remains so relevant—and entertaining!—nearly a century after it was composed. Take, for example, a line that has graced countless menus and word art wall decorations: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” Divorced from its source, this is a well-crafted sentence that rings true. Within the book, however, it is part of an argument about who funds higher education (and for whom). After eating a decadent lunch at men’s college and a lackluster dinner at women’s college on the same day, Woolf is inspired to think seriously about the difference between wine and water, beef and pheasant. It is all part of a larger discussion about how material conditions shape culture. Even adding just two more sentences to the excerpt greatly enhances the meaning of the fragment we know:

The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.

A Room of One’s Own is about “women and fiction”— fiction by women, fiction for women, and fiction about women. It opens with a direct address implying that the reader has commissioned what follows: “When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant.” The book was born out of lectures Woolf gave to students at two women’s colleges at Cambridge (Newnham and Girton), which Woolf then rewrote and revised for a year or so. She holds up the frame throughout the text, sometimes apologetically and at other times conspiratorially. She expects that her audience has a personal stake in the matter: “Are there no men present?…We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you…”

When it comes to fiction about women, Woolf shares hilarious insights, the kind that make you groan in recognition. On women writing fiction, she is interested in lineages known and unknown, recorded and lost to history. In a semi-linear pattern, she traces a path from seventeenth-century pioneers to the geniuses of the early nineteenth century to “the shelves that hold books by the living.” She is not always reverent or kind in her assessments, but she asserts that women make each others’ work possible across time. Aphra Behn made real money writing novels, legitimizing the pursuit to make way for the literary explosion of Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot. The writer of Woolf’s present, represented by the fictional Mary Carmichael, benefits from the foundation built by all these forebears. That writer is in the privileged position of having “mastered the first great lesson”: she can write without concentrating all of her energy on proving herself.

Woolf is sympathetic to the rage of women for whom such unselfconsciousness is impossible, and she mourns how frustration can stymy the work. “It was a thousand pities that the woman who could write like that, whose mind was tuned to nature and reflection, should have been forced to anger and bitterness,” she writes of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720). “But how could she have helped herself?” And she’s forthright about her own privilege, specifically her inheritance from her aunt, which allows her to avoid tedious jobs and subvert the dampening effects of bad faith male critics.

This kind of personal and historical analysis brings Woolf back to her deceptively simple thesis—“give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind”— throughout the essay. The titular room is, of course, both a metaphor and a literal thing. Austen might have felt a thrill from hiding her manuscripts with blotting paper every time someone entered the drawing room, but most of us need some space and time to concentrate to write anything of merit, whatever century we live in. And we all need to eat.

In line with her mapping of literary lineages, Woolf’s room is linked to the work of a predecessor. At the start of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf encounters a ghostly figure in the garden of a fictional women's college: “the famous scholar…J—— H—— herself.” J—— H—— is Jane Ellen Harrison, a groundbreaking classicist who was famous for her public lectures.1 In 1915, she published a collection, Alpha and Omega, that includes “Scientæ sacra fames,” originally a lecture titled “Women and Knowledge.” With her characteristic wry humor, she explains:

Man and wife share a dining-room. They are both animals, and must eat, so they do it together. Next comes the wife's room, the drawing-room: not a room to withdraw into, by yourself, but essentially the room into which " visitors are shown "—a room in which you can't possibly settle down to think, because anyone may come in at any moment. The drawing-room is the woman's province; she must be able and ready to switch her mind off and on at any moment, to anyone's concerns.

Then, at the back of the house, there is a hole or den, called a " study" —a place inviolate, guarded by immemorial taboos. There man thinks, and learns, and knows…The house where you don't and mustn't sit in the study is to me no home. But, then, I have long known that I am no "true woman." One of the most ominous signs of the times is that woman is beginning to demand a study.

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf lets flowers fall on the tombs of Harrison and many other writers. She also pins hopes on the writers she expects to come after her.

In her introduction to a 2005 annotated edition, Susan Gubar writes that many contemporary readers “continue to register the urgency of [the book’s] exhortations in their present lives.” At the time of A Room of One’s Own’s publication, women in the US and in England had had the right to vote for just a decade. Woolf both laughs and balks at the casual way she is barred from the lawns, libraries, and opportunities of her male contemporaries, remarking how “in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession they had sent my little fish into hiding.” Today, in the US and elsewhere, we can’t know the full extent to which the rights of so many people are currently endangered.

In our own “ominous sign of the times,” may the ripples of one big little Virginia Woolf fish multiply and push us to further our pursuit of knowledge, and our demands. May they join with ripples generated by Aphra Behn, Lady Murasaki, Lady Winchilsea, Vernon Lee, Margaret Cavendish, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eliot, Austen, Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë, and by all those writers who never wrote a word, or whose names we may never know. And may we feel empowered to let our line of thought dip deep into the stream, chasing after them.

Special thanks to JoAnn Borri and Julia Hawkins for leading the recent round table on Virginia Woolf and Jane Ellen Harrison at The Sitting Room Library. If you’re interested in Woolf and living in or traveling to the Bay Area, a visit to The Sitting Room to explore The Woolf Wall is essential.

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“Repair” in the Public Domain?

When works come into the public domain, we—the public—own them. We can republish them (as Cita does), adapt them, repurpose bits and pieces. This brings freedom, but also responsibility. When returning to, and possibly profiting from, the cultural objects of the past, what is our relationship to the harmful things they contain? “It was a different time,” some people say, eliding the evidence that many knew better, even then. Even when we accept that faulty logic, it’s not fun to settle in to a much-lauded book and encounter something racist or sexist or otherwise deeply offensive. So what do we do with these unsavory parts, now that the whole meal is ours? Do we excise what is harmful, with or without comment? Do we present things as is as a relic of “a different time,” with or without added context? Can we overstep in our attempts to make things more accessible and inclusive, or even replicate the hurtful patterns?

In countries where copyright expires fifty years after the author’s death, the works of Georgette Heyer have now entered the public domain.2 Heyer was a prolific novelist of historical romance novels and detective fiction. She is known as the “Queen” of the Regency-era romance novel — the genre that gave us Bridgerton. One of Heyer’s Regency novels, The Grand Sophy (1950), was republished by US publisher Sourcebooks in 2023 as part of a series of reissues featuring forewords by romance novelist Eloisa James (the scholar Mary Bly). The antisemitic portrayal of a character in the book prompted Sourcebooks to undertake a “literary repair,” hiring consultants to make revisions to the offensive material. According to a 2023 article in The New York Times (gift link), Heyer’s estate approved the changes but refused to allow the inclusion of an afterword acknowledging and explaining them. Bly, who also wrote the afterword, left the republication project in protest. However, it looks like a 2024 edition of the book came out with the afterword. In any case, the decision to revise the novel and the decision to present these revisions with or without commentary raised a lot of debate.

Another work new to the public domain (in the US) that’s re-presentation has kicked up controversy is celebrated Canadian artist Emily Carr’s 1929 painting The Indian Church. The painting is one of Carr’s most reproduced works. In 2018, the Art Gallery of Ontario changed the title to Church at Yuquot Village as part of a larger effort by curators of the Canadian and Indigenous Art department to review “hurtful and painful” titles on a case-by-case basis. Like with The Grand Sophy, others in the field saw the revisions as sanitizing history. Currently, the ACO’s online catalog lists the painting as “Untitled”…

If you have other examples of approaches to this issue, or ideas on approaches, please share them with us: info@citapress.org.

Cita Canon Spotlight

Woolf collaborated with and was inspired by many women. This month’s canon grows with two women who were extremely close to Woolf in work and life: her sister and her longtime lover and friend.

Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) shared many things with her younger sister, including a traumatic childhood, artistic talent, and a rejection of patriarchal values. Like Woolf, she was part of the Bloomsbury Group, a loose collective of artists and intellectuals that helped usher in a new age of modern ideas and ideals. She also co-directed the Omega Workshop. Her paintings were innovative and bold, showcasing her early adoption of and singular approach to Abstraction. She designed the original covers for her sister’s books; her work confused publishers and readers but delighted the author. “Your style is unique, because so truthful,” Woolf wrote, “and therefore it upsets one completely.” [Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour at MK Gallery]

When Woolf delivered the second of two lectures that eventually became A Room of One’s Own, she brought Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) to Girton College with her. A student at the talk described how the two writers “descended like goddesses from Olympus.” Indeed Woolf also saw her lover as a mythic figure, immortalizing her as a being who transcends time in the 1928 novel Orlando. But Sackville-West was an important and successful writer herself, and her literary achievements are a testament to her fascinating—and very human—life. She wrote about her relationships and sexuality in books like Portrait of a Marriage (unpublished until 1973) and Challenge (1923); she fictionalized Virginia and Leonard Woolf as Viola and Leonard Anquetil in Family History (1932). She was also one of two women featured in Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry series of anthologies. [“The Fabulous Forgotten Life of Vita Sackville-West” by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, Paris Review]

What else?

• Alice Walker expanding upon A Room of One’s Own for a meditation on Phillis Wheatley Peters in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983).

• Feeling a need to make of sense of some existential issues, in community? Us too. Here are two opportunities to read together, from a distance:

  • A Public Space is kicking off a new year of APS Together by reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey with poet and translator Stefania Heim.3

  • Leading up to their first new episode of 2025, Lost Ladies of Lit is exploring three texts about jewelry and human connection, including one from the public domain (“The Bracelets” by Maria Edgeworth).

• Librarian and community technologist Jessamyn West on her favorite things in the public domain, for Library Futures.

• Watch Internet Archive’s virtual Singin’ in the Public Domain event. If you’re in the US, we highly recommend looking up your town in for the Library of Congress’ Anywhere Adventures challenge let by Vivian Li!

• More from Lost Ladies of Lit: “Lost Ladies Who Feel Extra Relevant Right Now.”

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