KATIE POPPY MINTO
CITA PRESS: The Open-Access Publishing House Putting Feminist Literature in The Spotlight
Cita Press has a clear goal in mind: to keep the effervescence of feminist literature alive - and make it free.
I first stumbled upon Cita Press during a rabbit hole of extracurricular research into the lesbian modernist Gertrude Stein. Unfortunately for me, I tick the usual boxes of the modern day lesbian: ADHD and dyslexic, so the badly scanned pdfs of her work weren’t really cutting it. Fortunately for me, Cita had published a free online version of Tender Buttons 1914; one where I could change the font, size, line height, anything I wanted (I’m painfully particular) to ease my reading of her badly grammar-ed, but beautifully written notes and poems on a carafe, cranberries and change.
Cita’s idea is ambitious yet simple; resurrect the overlooked and bygone works of ‘those who first addressed gender inequality’, moulding both a feminist literature archive and graphic-design project. The name Cita comes from the Spanish word for date, appointment, and quotation, whilst also being a feminine diminutive suffix - a rather apt title for something that cites the works of female authors.
Founded in 2017 by New York Times designer and writer, Juliana Castro Varón, Cita began during her time as an MFA Design Student after noticing the lack of inclusion of female authors on classics reading lists and bookshelves. It wasn’t much better on the internet side of things either, with large open-access repositories focusing on quantity over curation, resulting in women writers typically being lost in the abyss of books or swept under the rug altogether.
So far Cita has published 19 books all available for free, with their most recents being A Luminous Halo: Selected Writings by Virginia Woolf and Planted in a Strange Earth: Selected Writings by Zitkála-Šá. Not to mention their Substack, Cita Press Bulletin, which boasts vast and fruitful collections of text and resources, covering topics from feminist horror to queer acts of reading; all managing to capture the same depth of knowledge that I had the pleasure of experiencing while in discussion with Cita’s Editorial Director, Jessi Haley.
Here, Haley speaks on sustaining Cita, past literary pioneers and the art of recovery research.
Katie Poppy Minto: One of the first things I noticed about Cita is the contemporary front cover designs for such classical literature, why is this?
Jessi Haley: Our founder, Juliana, saw design as the primary vehicle for making these books more visible and communicating something about them. Why are they relevant today? It helps in saying something about why it's fresh and interesting - using this visual language and then also pairing that with a contemporary scholar to write a foreword helps to contextualise the books further.
KPM: What does the process of designing the front cover look like?
JH: Artist Dajia Zhou designed the cover for our Nellie, Days in a Mad House. I remember Juliana explaining that because there are so many characters in the book, you have these doctors and judges and police and nurses and people with authority, and there are patients who represent a range of experiences, and then there's Nellie Bly, the journalist who's there under false pretences writing about all of them. Juliana was trying to think of an illustrator who does highly populated scenes, but in a way that is empathetic and emphasises individuality. She had come across Dajia’s ‘People-Watching’ series (year), and part of that project was that she didn’t have a lot of time, but still captured diversity and humanity in her work. So this felt very fitting.
KPM: So far you’ve publish 19 different authors writing, what does the process of publishing one of these books look like?
JH: It’s different every time. With our most recent book A Luminous Halo, our publishing partner, The Sitting Room, which is a feminist reading room that's been around since 1981, has this huge archive of Woolf’s writing. Lots of first editions, a bunch of archival scholarship that you can't find online. They pitched doing this collaboration together of widely cited but not typically collected together short, critical works.
But with publishing An Immortal Book: Selected Writings by Sui Sin Far, during that time we had more capacity for research from the grant. I’d discovered her work during research for our newsletter. I was shocked by how contemporary her voice was and that I had never heard of her. She was writing very explicitly political fiction and non-fiction around Chinese exclusion in North America. At the time she was writing, Chinese immigration was completely banned in the US and Canada. She was writing about this political moment in this way that no one else was, and getting these pieces placed in major magazines next to work by Edith Wharton and Walt Whitman.
When she died in 1914, her work sort of died with her. But the writing reads very fresh, both in its politics and its attitudes towards gender, race and what we would today call ‘intersectional feminism.’ This book was the first one we published in print (as well as online), mainly because it's really hard to find her work in print, so it felt worth it to just give people another way to read the text.
Part of what we do is what we call recovery work. Trying to find writers that are overlooked or just under-appreciated and keep them in the conversation.
KPM: The books you publish are all available for free, which is amazing! But how is Cita sustained?
JH: We started as an all-volunteer project for a few years. In 2021, Juliana got the first Mellon grant, so we were able to start compensating contributors and curate more. Now [sustained by further grants] we’re able to think about who would be the perfect person to make this cover or to write this foreword.
KPM: How do you choose the perfect person to write the foreword?
JH: We did a book of selected writings by Zitkála-Šá titled Planted in a Strange Earth. She was pretty famous when she was alive, making a lot of waves and being very influential on several planes. So I was looking for any kind of creative writer who has referenced her work, specifically looking at native writers. I was interested in how we look at history and identity, when I came across the poet Erin Marie Lynch and her book Removal Acts, where she directly cites Zitkála-Šá in a poem, and it felt like her work aligned. The attention she gave to Zitkála-Šá’s language! I think sometimes when we’re talking about people in the past, we focus too heavily on the historical context and forget to think about their actual artistry.
KPM: What’s next for Cita, can you give us a heads up on an upcoming book?
JH: Well I’ll keep it cryptic but we’re working on a never-before-published novel by a writer who is very influential yet not a household name. She was very involved in civil rights particularly during segregation and fighting for black students' access to education. She was a huge figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and has two unpublished novels in the public domain. We’re working to publish one of them. I think it’s important to mention the grey area around people's private writing or unpublished work, but in this case, she had been trying to get it published up until she died. We’re really excited to have this opportunity.
Our dream is that the stuff we do will help inspire people to create new work and projects to carry on our shared cultural heritages.