Launching our new capsule honoring 45 Years of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press with Philadelphia Printworks
Image of members of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press (l-r): Barbara Smitih, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga and Hattie Gossett at the Women in Print Conference, Washington, DC, 1981. Photo by JEB Media.
Our latest t-shirt capsule with Philadelphia PrintWorks honors 45 years since the founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first publishing house for and by women of color in North America.
On Tuesday, October 14 at 6:30 PM EST via Black Women Radicals YouTube Live, join Black Women Radicals and Philadelphia PrintWorks as we celebrate our new t-shirt collection celebrating 45 years since the founding of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press with Barbara Smith! Co-founded by Smith, Audre Lorde and other visionary feminist writers and activists in 1980, Kitchen Table: Women of Color press was the first publishing house founded by and for women of color in North America.
You can view the collection here: https://philadelphiaprintworks.com/collections/kitchen-table-press
Created to amplify the voices of women of color whose work was often excluded from mainstream publishing, Kitchen Table Press became a home for groundbreaking texts that reshaped feminist thought and movement work such as Cuentos: Stories by Latinas (1983) by Alma Gómez and Cherríe Moraga; This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1984, second edition, originally published by Persephone Press in 1981) by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa; and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983; reprinted by Rutgers University Press, 2000) by Barbara Smith.
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.
During this conversation, Barbara Smith will discuss the formation of Kitchen Table; its creation as a transformative intervention to center the lives, voices, and perspectives of feminists of color; the triumphs as well as difficulties of running the press; and the afterlives of Kitchen Table and the importance of sharing, documenting, archiving, and publishing our stories during fascist times.
This event will be moderated by Maryam Pugh, CEO of Philadelphia PrintWorks and Jaimee A. Swift, founder and executive director of Black Women Radicals and The School for Black Feminist Politics.
Flyer promoting event on 45 years of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press (l-r): Jaimee A. Swift, Barbara Smith, and Maryam Pugh.
About the Panelists
Barbara Smith is a visionary Black feminist activist, author, scholar, and publisher. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she and her twin sister, Beverly, began participating in civil rights protests in the 1960s. In 1974, Smith co-founded the Combahee River Collective in Boston, Massachusetts, and in 1977, she co-authored the Combahee River Collective Statement, with Beverly, and Demita Frazier. Smith taught her first class on Black women’s literature in 1973 at Emerson College and has taught at numerous colleges and universities.
Smith was a leader in defining and establishing the field of Black women’s studies in the United States. She published work that introduced for the first time close textual analysis of Black fiction that included gender and sexuality as an analytical lens. Her groundbreaking 1977 essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” opened the door to serious critical consideration of Black women writers. From 1975 through 1978 Barbara served as a member of the Modern Language Association Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession where she had a national impact upon the creation of new courses and curricula focused on the previously neglected work of Black women authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and Ann Petry.
She co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher of books for women of color, in 1980. She is the co-editor, along with Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull and Patricia Bell Scott, of All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, the first comprehensive collection of Black feminist scholarship; editor of Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983; reprinted by Rutgers University Press, 2000); The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom (2000); and Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith (2014), edited by Alethia Jones, Virginia Eubanks, and Barbara Smith. In 2005, Smith was elected to the Common Council in Albany, New York. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize that same year. Smith’s essays, reviews and other work has been published in The New York Times, The Black Scholar, Ms., The Guardian, The Village Voice, and The Nation, among others.
Maryam Pugh (she/her/hers) is a printmaker based in Philadelphia. She is the owner and CEO of the social justice apparel brand and screen printing workshop, Philadelphia Printworks. Through her work, she strives to amplify marginalized voices and empower communities of color.
Jaimee A. Swift (she/her) is the executive director and founder of Black Women Radicals, a Black feminist advocacy organization dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender expansive people's radical activism in Africa and in the African Diaspora. Swift is also the creator and founder of The School for Black Feminist Politics (SBFP), which has a mission of empowering Black feminisms in politics by expanding the field from transnational, intersectional, and multidisciplinary perspectives. She is the co-author, with Joseph R. Fitzgerald, of the forthcoming biography of Black feminist icon, Barbara Smith, who is a founding member of the Combahee River Collective; co-author of the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977); co-founder of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first press run by and for women of color in North America; and an architect of Black Women’s Studies in the United States. She is the co-editor of We Are Each Other’s Liberation: Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities (Haymarket Books) and is the lead editor of the forthcoming anthology, A Furious Flower Blooms: Honoring the Intellectual and Political Leadership of Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin, who founded the first center for Black poetry in the United States, the Furious Flower Poetry Center.
