2005 - 2006 Award Winner: Aunt Lute Books

We at STANDARDS are pleased to present our 2004 - 2005 Best of the Small Presses Award to the venerable — and necessary — Aunt Lute Books, of San Francisco, California. In addition to our reviews of nine titles from their impressive catalog, we offer a brief history of Aunt Lute here, as part of this year's tribute to the finest of independent publishers.

- Canéla A. Jaramillo

A Brief Historical Overview

Like many early feminist presses, the Aunt Lute Book Company began as a print shop, called the Iowa City Women's Press. Founded in 1972 as a lesbian publishing collective, the press began offering such titles as The Greasy Thumb and Against the Grain — manuals on automechanics and carpentry for women.

A decade later, members Joan Pinkvoss and Barb Wieser established Aunt Lute as the press's publishing branch, increasing their booklist with Dodici Azpadu's Saturday Night in the Prime of Life and Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression, edited by Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser.

In 1985, Aunt Lute merged with Spinsters Ink, a feminist press founded in 1978 by Judith McDaniel and Maureen Brady in Argyle, New York, which had moved to San Francisco with a new publisher, Sherry Thomas, in 1983. The union of Aunt Lute and Spinsters brought together 28 feminist books which, according to an early mailing, were "so ahead of their times they will never sell out at Crown Books, or reach the New York Times bestseller list." Such a far-sighted books include Audre Lorde's powerful memoir, The Cancer Journals.

In 1990, the presses diverged, with Aunt Lute forming a non-profit corporation, the Aunt Lute Foundation. As a multicultural women's press in San Francisco under the direction of Joan Pinkvoss, Aunt Lute has continued "to publish and distribute books that reflect the complex truths of women's lives and the possibilities for personal and social change" for thirty years.

Aunt Lute publishes such acclaimed anthologies as Gloria Anzaldúa's, Making Face, Making Soul/ Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives By Women of Color, and other collections of essays and short fiction representing the diversity of women writing today. Their catalog of titles also includes novels that reveal the complex histories of the lives of women of color, such as LeAnne Howe's Shell Shaker, which won the 2002 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. Their mission — "to print works of literature by women who have been traditionally under-represented in mainstream and small press publishing" — keeps Aunt Lute at the forefront of feminist publishing today.

-Kayann Short

Our congratulations, once again, to Aunt Lute Books, for their continued evolutions toward providing some of the very best forward-thinking, inclusive, and necessary works of our times.

Each of the ten Aunt Lute titles reviewed in this issue of STANDARDS are highly recommended for both personal reading and classroom instruction.

For more information, including the book catalog; intern program opportunities; submission guidelines; and a new online bookstore, please visit the Aunt Lute web site.

 Aunt Lute Books in Review

Alice Walker Banned, by Alice Walker, with an introduction by Patricia Holt

Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers, eds. Nick Carbó and Eileen Tabios

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, by Gloria Anzaldúa

Cancer Journals, Special Edition, by Audre Lorde

Junglee Girl, by Ginu Kamani

Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives By Women of Color, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa

Shell Shaker, by LeAnne Howe

Through the Eye of the Deer: An Anthology of Native American Women Writers, eds. Carolyn Dunn and Carol Comfort

The Unforgetting Heart: An Anthology of Short Stories by African American Women (1859 - 1993), edited by Asha Kanwar