VIDA's New List of Women-Run Presses, Organizations, & Literary Magazines

Kate Angus of Augury Books has compiled a list of presses, organizations, and literary magazines run by women for VIDAWEB.

I hadn’t initially intended for my series to focus on women-run presses, but then while out for drinks with my friend Jen, a fellow poet, we found ourselves making a list of women-run and/or women-founded presses in New York, mostly with the idea of someday throwing a huge party. We were surprised at how few names we came up with—we knew there must be presses we’d forgotten to list or didn’t know about yet. The next day I reached out to a few organizations to see if someone else already had a list like this, but no one did. It bothered me that this list—which seemed like such a fundamentally useful resource—didn’t exist yet so I decided to compile it myself. I didn’t want to exclude presses with some men on board, but I wanted to focus on places with a strong female editorial presence, either currently or historically.

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When we keep prioritizing the same voices and narratives over and over again, we get trapped inside a self-replicating machine of This Is What Important Literature Looks Like. This can affect how editors and other gatekeepers respond to narratives involving gender just as much as race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, trans and non-binary stories, and work that explores the life experiences of people with disabilities, and those of different ages and class brackets. Editors need to step outside of that machine and that may be easier to do if their own experiences are different than the Important Literature narratives we’ve been taught—the Hemingway story, the Jonathan Franzen story. I’m not saying Hemingway and Franzen aren’t important writers; but they aren’t the only ones. While many editors of all types absolutely do look for diverse voices, those with life experiences and identities different than the hegemonic narrative may often be better able to recognize these writers’ merits—either because they may be making a more consistent, conscious choice to support diverse voices or because they don’t have to make an imaginative leap to be inside these other stories in quite the same way as those whose look in the mirror each morning and see Holden Caulfield, Nick Carraway or Hal Incandenza staring back at them. In that sense, I hope that this list will be a useful resource for women writers looking for places to submit their work just as much as for people who want to support presses and journals run by women.

Find her full list here.