Feminist Press Inc
Programs and results
What we aim to solve
For nearly five decades, the Feminist Press has worked to disrupt the traditional paradigm of our industry with a new wave of revolutionary, diverse, and inclusive publishing. Our press fosters a diverse creative space for all the writers and readers who are underserved by and underrepresented in mainstream literary culture. A society’s values, norms, and possibilities are shaped by the kinds of stories that circulate within it. For too long, our culture has been guided by a restrictive canon, repeating the same old stories and silencing new alternatives. Nowhere is this tendency more evident than in publishing, an industry characterized both by demographic homogeneity—79 percent white, 88 percent heterosexual, 99 percent cisgender, and 92 percent nondisabled, according to a 2015 survey of North American publishers—and by persistent overwhelming failure to recognize and celebrate writing from marginalized communities.
Our programs
What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, and who do the programs serve?
Amethyst Editions
Amethyst Editions is an imprint of the Feminist Press curated by artist and author Michelle Tea. This imprint champions emerging queer writers who employ genre-bending narratives and experimental writing styles in order to complicate the conversation around American LGBTQ+ experiences beyond a coming out narrative.
Louise Meriwether First Book Prize
The Louise Meriwether First Book Prize was founded in 2016 to honor the legacy of author Louise Meriwether by publishing a debut work by a woman or nonbinary author of color. The prize is granted to a manuscript that follows in the tradition of Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner, one of the first contemporary American novels featuring a young black girl as the protagonist.
Meriwether’s groundbreaking text inspired the careers of writers like Jacqueline Woodson and Bridgett M. Davis, among many others. The prize continues this legacy of telling much-needed stories that shift culture and inspire new writers.
The inaugural prize was awarded to writer YZ Chin for her short story collection, Though I Get Home. The Feminist Press published Chin’s collection in spring 2018.
Drag Queen Story Hour Books
Inspired by the iconic event series, Drag Queen Story Hour Books capture the imagination and play of gender fluidity while giving children positive and unabashedly queer role models. Fun, fantastical, full-color books recreate the magic of the DQSH readings and teach self-acceptance and self-love. Through characters that defy rigid gender norms, readers are introduced to a world where people can express their full selves and where dress up is real. Curated by DQSH founder Michelle Tea.
Where we work
External reviews
Videos
Our results
How does this organization measure their results? It's a hard question but an important one.
Number of works published from new writers
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Related Program
Louise Meriwether First Book Prize
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Increasing
Context Notes
Investing in up-and-coming authors, editors, and translators from communities typically underrepresented in the literary world is central to our mission.
Number of public events held to further mission
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Increasing
Context Notes
We organize free public events including readings, panel discussions, and workshops to lift up our books and connect FP authors with audiences around the nation.
Number of attendees present at rallies/events
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Increasing
Context Notes
Our book events engage diverse audiences and invite all kinds of voices to join in accessible feminist conversations.
Total number of works developed
This metric is no longer tracked.Totals By Year
Type of Metric
Output - describing our activities and reach
Direction of Success
Holding steady
Context Notes
We publish books representing complex and nuanced experiences of intersectional feminism.
Our Sustainable Development Goals
Learn more about Sustainable Development Goals.
Goals & Strategy
Reports and documents
Download strategic planLearn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress.
Charting impact
Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results.
What is the organization aiming to accomplish?
Our work advances three core goals:
—To elevate creative voices at risk of being silenced, appropriated, or marginalized.
FP’s editorial vision blossoms from our commitment to amplifying voices from the margins. Our press is a home for feminist narratives and experiences beyond the single story. The goal of our editorial program is to support creative experimentation and elevate new voices and perspectives. Countering traditional gatekeeping practices of the publishing industry, we invest in emerging writers with bold new narratives, opening spaces for ideas deemed too radical or controversial by mainstream culture.
—To incubate up-and-coming professional talent from diverse backgrounds.
As a nearly-fifty-year-old publishing institution, we’re committed to advancing our industry by cultivating a diverse new generation of publishing professionals. Our intern and mentorship programs aim to combat documented systemic disparities in access to publishing by providing young women, people of color, transgender and nonbinary people, disabled people, queer people, and members of low-income communities with the foundational support they need to advance in the field.
—To innovate best practices for social-justice-driven publishing.
FP is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2020 under historic new leadership that positions us to step up as the nation’s foremost resource for intersectional feminist literary activism. In 2017, activist and movement-maker Jamia Wilson became the first woman of color and the youngest person to ever serve as FP’s executive director and publisher, and in 2018, journalist and writer Linda Villarosa was appointed board chair. With these women at the helm, FP is better equipped than ever to engage publishing at every level as a tool for substantive cultural transformation.
The FP board and staff are currently finalizing a three-year strategic plan launched in spring 2019. The plan outlines three priorities: we will increase organizational excellence by setting clear and transparent financial, administrative, and governance policies; build organizational capacity and financial sustainability; and deepen the impact of our work within our community as well as the broader publishing industry. We aim to leverage the strategic growth enabled by this plan to bring our feminist intervention to the next level: to bring revolutionary words and ideas to new audiences and build bigger platforms for the thought leadership of literary artists from marginalized communities.
What are the organization's key strategies for making this happen?
Our strategies include:
—Publishing Initiatives
- Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, awarded annually to a debut work by a woman or nonbinary author of color. Prize winners receive a publishing contract and $5,000 advance.
- Amethyst Editions, a queer imprint curated by Michelle Tea, dedicated to complicating mainstream LGBTQ+ representation beyond the traditional coming-out narrative.
- A robust catalog of work in translation, focused on literary fiction from countries underrepresented in the US literary market. Recent translated works include books from Equatorial Guinea, Thailand, Bosnia, Mexico, Uruguay, and Guadeloupe.
—Programming and Community Outreach
To elevate our authors and connect their work with readers, we build free public programming around our titles, designed to engage diverse audiences and invite all kinds of voices to join in conversation. We partner with universities, libraries, bookstores, and other cultural venues in New York City and around the nation. We also foster an extensive and participatory digital community and work closely with a network of literature and women’s studies professors to facilitate the use of our books as teaching tools.
—Support for Authors and Content Creators
We support a diverse community of authors, editors, translators, and illustrators, including many women and nonbinary writers, writers of color, LGBTQ+ writers, and immigrant and international writers. Investing in up-and-coming creators from communities typically underrepresented in the literary world is central to our mission, and many of our authors make their publishing debut with us. By publishing and promoting their work, we empower artists to shape cultural narratives and help them build sustainable speaking, educating, and writing careers. Our small size allows us to furnish creators with a level of care and attention that larger houses are unable to offer, and all contributors, whether established or emerging, maintain significant artistic control over their work.
—Mentorship and Training for the Next Generation of Diverse Publishing Professionals
Our paid apprenticeship program, serving twelve participants each year, opens doors to aspiring publishers from all backgrounds. FP interns work with the entire staff to learn the ins and outs of feminist publishing and have an exceptional opportunity to shape FP’s voice by participating in twice-yearly editorial meetings. We also serve as a resource for professional development and technical assistance to a network of feminist and literary partners to help students from underserved populations access support and mentorship in the writing and publishing industries.
What are the organization's capabilities for doing this?
The Feminist Press is the world’s longest-running feminist publisher. With over fifty years of experience utilizing publishing as a tool of feminist activism, we know our industry has the potential to change the world. Our small but mighty team serves a global community of artists and supporters and advances a wide variety of feminist priorities. We’re unapologetic about promoting the stories and voices that our culture needs, even when the mainstream might consider these ideas too risky, radical, or controversial.
Throughout FP’s history, we’ve worked to spread the vital message that marginalized people do not have to wait for permission to tell our own stories, nor prove our legitimacy to media gatekeepers. We’ve taken crucial steps toward making the literary and publishing arenas into welcoming spaces that mirror the full spectrum of human diversity. Our experience working with authors, readers, interns, and others looking to gain access to an often inhospitable cultural realm shows us the urgency of this intervention. Mustering the collective experience and expertise of our community, we aim to build an industry infrastructure that at every level nurtures, supports, and sustains the creative careers and personal transformations of people from marginalized communities.
What have they accomplished so far and what's next?
FP was founded in 1970 as a crucial component of second wave feminism: it furnished texts for the burgeoning field of women’s studies, reprinted feminist classics, and recovered lost literature by global women writers. Now in its fifty-first year, FP is the vanguard of inclusive, intersectional feminism, elevating the voices and stories our culture urgently needs and engaging important social questions with nuance and complexity.
As an activist publisher, our biggest accomplishment is the transformative change we’ve initiated and sustained in our industry. Countering a literary landscape dominated by white male voices, we equip a wide-ranging community of authors, translators, and illustrators with the tools to speak out and be heard. In 2018, we published seventeen titles, including twelve works written, edited, or illustrated by women of color; eleven works by debut authors/translators launching their literary careers; and four works in translation from around the globe. Recent honors for authors include the Whiting Award for Fiction, Lambda Literary Award, Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award, PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and nominations for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Best Translated Book Award, and National Translation Award. Our backlist catalog contains over 400 titles representing a diverse range of authors, genres, and topics.
We engage a global community of readers and supporters. In 2019, we hosted over 100 readings, panels, and workshops in four US states, serving over 3,500 attendees. Our digital network includes 14.6K newsletter subscribers, 51.5K Twitter followers, 16.3K Facebook followers, and 14.5K Instagram followers. Through our apprenticeship and mentoring programs, we open doors for aspiring feminist professionals of all backgrounds and cultivate the diverse, vibrant future of the publishing industry. Intern alumni have gone on to jobs at Simon & Schuster, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Harper Collins, Penguin Random House, W.W. Norton & Co., Oxford University Press, Verso, Signs, Women Make Movies, On the Issues, The Nation, and more.
As we enter our fifty-third year in 2023, our vision is to use publishing to carve out ever-bigger spaces for inclusive, diverse, intersectional feminist thought in the wider world. In 1970, our founder expected that a feminist press would only need to exist for a short time before becoming redundant. Five decades later, our culture still desperately needs channels for the amplification of marginalized voices, and the publishing world has far to go before all participants and stories are welcome. By elevating the next generation of literary changemakers and springboarding diverse publishing professionals, FP aims to sustain a multigenerational feminist community of creators, readers, thought leaders, and publishing professionals working together to engage the revolutionary potential of storytelling for social justice.
Financials
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Operations
The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick.
Connect with nonprofit leaders
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Connect with nonprofit leaders
SubscribeBuild relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. Try a low commitment monthly plan today.
- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
- Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools
- Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations
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Feminist Press Inc
Board of directorsas of 02/17/2023
Linda Villarosa
Helene Goldfarb
Retired educator
Lori Fox
Higher education and nonprofit attorney
Matthew Backus
Asistant Professor of Economic Analysis and Policy, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business
Hitha Palepu
Investor and author
Dara Kagan
First Vice President of Social Impact Banking, Amalgamated Bank
Thomas Bourveau
Assistant Professor of Accounting, Columbia Graduate School of Business
Trieste Ciotola
Assistant Director of Foundation Partnerships, UNICEF USA
Norrell Edwards
Scholar, activist, communications consultant
Chiseche Mibenge
Human rights educator and researcher
Nancy Sheppard
Director, Bluestocking Literary marketing
Hannah Egerton
Director of Candidate Services, Campaign Finance Board
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf
Lawyer and nonprofit executive leader
Florence Wright
Radiation oncologist
Mónica Tavares
Associate vice chancellor for communications and marketing at the City University of New York
Whitney Hu
Director of Civic Engagement and Research at Churches United for Fair Housing
Laura K. Hamilton
Senior Director of Strategic Competition Initiatives at Oracle
Board leadership practices
GuideStar worked with BoardSource, the national leader in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section.
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Board orientation and education
Does the board conduct a formal orientation for new board members and require all board members to sign a written agreement regarding their roles, responsibilities, and expectations? Yes -
CEO oversight
Has the board conducted a formal, written assessment of the chief executive within the past year ? Yes -
Ethics and transparency
Have the board and senior staff reviewed the conflict-of-interest policy and completed and signed disclosure statements in the past year? Yes -
Board composition
Does the board ensure an inclusive board member recruitment process that results in diversity of thought and leadership? Yes -
Board performance
Has the board conducted a formal, written self-assessment of its performance within the past three years? Yes
Organizational demographics
Who works and leads organizations that serve our diverse communities? Candid partnered with CHANGE Philanthropy on this demographic section.
Leadership
The organization's leader identifies as:
Race & ethnicity
No data
Gender identity
No data
Transgender Identity
No data
Sexual orientation
No data
Disability
No data