Finding Lost Voices: Writing Back Voices with Cita Press
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
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This week, I want to introduce you to another advocate out there who is doing the work to bring back lost or misremembered women. I want to introduce you to Cita Press.
But first, let’s talk about Keats. I teach creative writing to undergrads and as a biographer, one of my favorite lessons is the mini-biographies. We read Fleur Jaeggy’s stunning essay on Keats from her book, These Possible Lives, and use her work to discuss what a biography is and how a biographer makes choices about how she tells a story. For most students, the only mini-biographies they’ve ever come across are those brief author introductions found in anthologies of literature which are mostly a cradle-to-grave approach. However, what Jaeggy does is different. She approaches Keats from an angle at which we’ve never seen him before so that even if we knew the romantic poet before reading her essay, we know him differently when we finish. She sets the tone of the story by telling us the guillotine was the most popular children’s toy when Keats was a child, and then by introducing this famous poet as a troubled child who gets into fights in grade school. By approaching Keats in this indirect manner, no matter how we saw him before we began reading the essay, we see him in a new light.
It’s a great lesson. After, students are excited about trying their mini-biographies. But the hardest part for them is figuring out who they want to write about. Who is misremembered? Who is forgotten? This year, I solved that problem by introducing them to Cita Press.
Cita Press is a feminist indie press publishing open-access books written by women founded by Juliana Castro Varón. As Jessi Haley, Cita’s Editorial Director explained it, they take works by women that have fallen out of copyright and disappeared from view and bring them back in a readable format. Haley further explained that “we are at a point in our history where we can find these authors” and challenge the dominant narrative of what women were like in the past by making their work more accessible. Haley, who is a descendant of Victoria Woodhull (a suffragist who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election), told us there is so much material out there but we are fed this scarcity lie. We are told that so many women didn’t write or publish their work. Cita Press has well-known works by authors like Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper) and Kate Chopin (The Awakening). Unknown works by authors we have misremembered like Louisa May Alcott whose thriller, Behind a Mask, she wrote under the pseudonym, A.M. Bernard, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Mathilda, the novel she wrote shortly after finishing Frankenstein that went unpublished for more than a century. And works by authors that have disappeared like The Beautiful by Vernon Lee and An Immortal Book: Selected Writings by Sui Sin Far.
“All my ambition is to make myself useful, known, heard, and admired by the wise and the brave.” —Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton)
(I’ll be publishing a bonus post on my interview with Jessi Haley and about the author Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) for paid subscribers on Monday).
But it’s not just that Cita Press brings these books or writings back into print, they do so in style. Each book has a uniquely designed cover by a modern artist. For example, the cover for Sui Sin Far’s collection was designed by Shuhua Xiong, an interdisciplinary artist from Shanghai, now based in Queens, New York.
Last week, when Jessi Haley visited my classroom and introduced my students to all of the authors at Cita every single one of my students left excited to write their mini biography about one of Cita Press’s authors. Some wrote about Louise May Alcott whom they’d only known as the author of Litte Women before. Some wrote about Vernon Lee an author they had never encountered before. Others wrote about Sui Sin Far and discovered a literary foremother they’d never known existed. Honestly, pairing this assignment with a visit with Cita Press gave the assignment purpose, an act of activism, and the mini-biographies they wrote were some of the best I’ve seen written by undergraduate writers. I hope you will visit Cita Press's site and leave with the same excitement. There are so many women authors out there for us to read!
Thanks to everyone who is reading and sharing these posts! Don’t forget to become a paid subscriber so you can also enjoy the bonus posts and content!
I’d love to see you all at one of my upcoming readings! See below for a list of where I will be over the next few weeks.
Upcoming Readings
TONIGHT! 2/2 6:00 PM PST at Readers’ Books, Sonoma, CA with poets Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Nicole Callihan, and Gillian Conoley who will read from their work.
2/7 6-8 PM CST Wild Patience: Readings by Poet Moms, 21 C Museum Hotel 219 W. 9th St.Kansas City, MO
2/7 8-10:30 PM CST Wednesday Night Poetry Live Charlotte Street Foundation 3333 Wyoming, Kansas City, MO
2/8 12:10 -1:25 PM CST “Getting New Writers to Write: Teaching Outside of the English Department” Room 2103A Kansas City Convention Center
1:45 -3:00 PM CST “Biography: The Radical Work of Writing Lives” Room 2105 Kansas City Convention Center
2/8 2:00 PM PST I Aim to Misbehave: Annie Oakley and Other Defiant Historical Women -Virtual - The virtual launch of LADY WING SHOT by Sara Moore Wagner with Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Caroline Plasket and Rikki Santer.
2/8 5-7 PM CST Braving the Body Anthology Launch Cheval on Main, 3940 Main St.Kansas City, MO
2/9 1-2 PM CST Book Signing, Trio House Press, Table 818, Kansas City, MO
2/9 3-3:30 CST Book Signing, Vermont Studio Center, Table 1438, Kansas City, MO
2/15 7:00 PM PST at John Natsoulas Gallery, Davis, CA with poets Iris Jamahl Dunkle and Cami Rothmuller
2/17 5:00 PM PST at Jessel Gallery, Napa, CA with LENORE HIRSCH, MARY HOLMAN TUTEUR, IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE, PAUL WAGNER
Wow, thanks so much, Iris, for introducing me to Cita. What a terrific, smart, well-designed resource. I'll do my best to spread the word. Cheers and happy writing.
Thank you so much for highlighting our work, and for getting your students engaged with it, too! It was a pleasure to talk with them and answer their (incredibly thoughtful) questions about Cita, our authors, and more.