Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press

Background

In the early 1970s, Barbara Smith was teaching courses about black women writers at Emerson College. However, she found that the books she required for her courses were often out of print and it was difficult to obtain specific novels. She has said that, "That was because nobody cared if Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God or Ann Petry's The Street was available. People did not care because they were considered to be marginal and unimportant writers."

Another main factor that ultimately led to the development of Kitchen Table was the racism within the mainstream women's movement during the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a result, women of color decided to come up with their own alternative.

Beginnings

In her essay "A Press of our Own: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press", founder Barbara Smith describes the beginnings of the press this way: "In October 1980, Audre Lorde said to me during a phone conversation, 'We really need to do something about publishing.'" Smith recounts how "it was at that meeting that Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was born. We did not arrive at a name or announce our existence until a year later, but at that initial meeting we did decide to be a publisher for all women of color." In an interview with Joseph F. Beam in Blacklight Magazine, Lorde spoke to the need to "develop those structures (like Kitchen Table) that will present and circulate our culture." As a result of Lorde's suggestion, Smith assembled a group for a meeting on Halloween weekend in Boston, the home city of the press in its first year.

In 1981, Smith relocated the press to New York City after leaving the University of Massachusetts at Boston. However, on most of the press's publications, Latham, New York, near Albany, is listed as the place of publication. Smith, Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Hattie Gossett, Helena Byard, Susan Yung, Ana Oliveira, Rosío Alvarez, Alma Gomez and Leota Lone Dog are all considered co-founders of the organization. Smith explained the name of the press as "the kitchen is the center of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other." The imagery of the kitchen table refers to the organization's grassroots function.

Some of Kitchen Table's most popular titles include: 1984 anthology by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa titled This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and Barbara Smith's Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, first published in 1984. Audre Lorde's I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities was also published by the press in 1986. An additional publication that the press printed in Alma Gómez and Cherríe Moraga's Cuentos: Stories by Latinas in 1983. By 1983 the press was also distributing more than 100 titles by women of color from other independent presses.

"In addition to these books, in 1986, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press published its Freedom Organizing Pamphlet Series, which included the Combahee River Collective's The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties. Audre Lorde and Merle Woo's Apartheid U.S.A. / Freedom Organizing in the Eighties, Audre Lorde's I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities (No. 3), Barbara Omolade's It's a Family Affair: The Real Lives of Black Single Mothers (No. 4), Angela Y. Davis's Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism (No. 5), and Merle Woo's Our Common Enemy, Our Common Cause: Freedom Organizing in the Eighties."