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citapress.bsky.social
Cita Press
@citapress.bsky.social
70 followers 51 following 63 posts
Open access feminist press
We publish free, carefully designed books by women
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citapress.bsky.social
Cita Press @citapress.bsky.social · Jun 23
Women authors have historically been underrepresented and underpublicized in the male-dominated, profit-driven publishing industry. Cita highlights and promotes open access books written by women! We make these women writers’ works accessible to all, in free editions 📚💙
citapress.bsky.social
Cita Press titles are now available on BRIET, a new platform from Brick House Cooperative that allows libraries to buy permanent copies of ebooks (instead of repeatedly paying licensing fees on the same titles).

Cita books are free—to libraries and to all. 📚💙https://market.briet.app/#cita-press
A screenshot of a page from the BRIET Marketplace site. It reads "Purchase digital books fro libraries, for patrons, forever. Not a librarian? Send this page on to your local library. We are BRIET, and our mission is to sell ebooks to libraries, so they can be loaned freely to you. Pictured: The Old Maid by Edith Wharton (Cita Press edition)
October 22, 2025 at 4:31 PM
citapress.bsky.social
Bay Area readers! TONIGHT (10/14, 7 pm), head to Mrs. Dalloway's in Berkeley for "Scribbling Women" Strike Back, a Litquake panel on recovering the legacies, work, and (often wild) stories of women writers. 📚💙

Details and RSVP here: litquake2025.sched.com/event/28SCE/...
Litquake, "Scribbling Women" Strike Back! A discussion on recovering the voices of women writers whose legacies have been erased, lost, or distorted. Oct. 14, 7-8:30pm, Mrs. Dalloway's in Berkeley. Free, $10-$15 suggested donation. Black and white photos of six panelists: Jessi Haley, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Jessica Ferri, Kim Askew and Amy Helmes, Emily Van Duyne, Mimi Pond (Pond's photo is a cartoon self portrait of Pond's head floating out of a ripple)
October 14, 2025 at 5:10 PM
citapress.bsky.social
Planted in a Strange Earth: Selected Writings by Zitkála-Šá brings together fiction, nonfiction, & poetry by one of the most influential feminist activist-artists of the twentieth century. Available for free at citapress.org — read a story to celebrate Indigenous Peoples' Day! 📚💙
A square image of the book cover of Planted in a Strange Earth: Selected Writings by Zitkala-Sa, feat. the title over a photo illustration of a young Zitkala-Sa in profile, doubled and facing in opposite directions over a background with a Dakota geometric print
October 13, 2025 at 10:08 PM
citapress.bsky.social
Read the latest issue of the Cita Press Bulletin, which digs into the collaborative process behind our new (FREE!) book: A Luminous Halo: Selected Writings by Virginia Woolf. An invitation to all common readers; be our “fellow worker” and “accomplice”!

📚💙

substack.com/home/post/p-...
October 6, 2025 at 7:34 PM
citapress.bsky.social
For the latest issue of the Cita Press Bulletin, we explored 3 writers we want to read in translation, with help from the scholars & translators bringing them back into prominence: Ntšeliseng 'Masechele Khaketla, Na Hye-sŏk, and Albertina Bertha. Learn more: citapress.substack.com/p/there-is-a...
September 8, 2025 at 10:08 PM
citapress.bsky.social
For #womenintranslationmonth, here are 5 new English translations of works by iconic women writers from across the globe🧵

These translations bring new readers to old(er) books and expand our access to the feminist canon. We are grateful to the translators and publishers who made this possible.

📚💙
Yellow slide with a vertical white bar on the left. Text begins in the white line and moves out to the yellow, reading: “Old Books, New Translations”
August 20, 2025 at 8:16 PM
citapress.bsky.social
Award-winning Canadian poet, prose writer, translator, and classicist Anne Carson (b. 1950) on translation.

From a 2001 discussion with Brighde Mullin for the Lannan Foundation. Full video 🔗: lannan.org/media/anne-c...

#WITMONTH #womenintranslation #WIT 📚💙
August 15, 2025 at 9:15 PM
citapress.bsky.social
🐈WRITERS AND CATS 🐱
Elsa Morante and her cats!

Morante’s love for cats crept into her writings such as History: A Novel (translated by William Weaver, 1977) featuring Rossella, the striped orange and red cat!

#WITMONTH #womenintranslation #WIT 📚💙
Black and white image of Elsa Morante, an Italian woman wearing a dark shawl on her head and holding a disgruntled white cat who looks at the camera, both of them in front of bookshelves and hanged art. A black and white photo of a young Elsa Morante, an Italian woman with curly, dark hair, wearing a dark sweater and holding two cats before a bookshelf. One is in her arms and the other rests on her shoulder, both of them looking at the camera.
August 13, 2025 at 8:46 PM
citapress.bsky.social
If you are in the San Francisco area, find us at the @litquake.org Small Press Book Fair on September 28!

We will also be participating in a panel on October 14; keep a look out for more information!!

📚💙
litquake.org Litquake @litquake.org · Aug 7
Local literature + poetry readings + live music?? You got to be kidding me.
Join us on 9/28 from 11-4pm for the Small Press Book Fair ft Litquake Out Loud.

📅Sep 28, 11–4
📍Yerba Buena Gardens Esplanade
🌟Full list of vendors: bit.ly/44P1jJN
💖 Free & open to all!

@yerbabuenagardens.bsky.social
August 11, 2025 at 9:24 PM
citapress.bsky.social
Find yourself by the water this summer? Here are six different writings on waterways, shorelines, and the critters you might find in their sands or skies.

This post is inspired by the scholarship of Susan A.C. Rosen, editor of Shorewords: A Collection of American Women’s Coastal Writings (2003)
📚💙
Blue design of layered, wavy shapes to imitate the appearance of water. Blue-scaled covers of the books mentioned later in this post float on the waves and yellow text at the top reads: “6 Beach Reads;” while white text at the bottom reads: “for nature lovers.” Yellow background with two book covers. The first cover is for “Gray Lady and the Birds” by Mabel Osgood Wright published in 1907. The faded cover features the illustration of three birds (or a sequence of one bird) flying over trees and into the distance. The title is printed in yellow at the top of the cover; the author is printed in the bottom-right just above the treeline. The second cover is for “London Parks and Gardens” by Alicia Amherst (or Mrs. Evelyn Cecil) published in 1907 with Illustrations by Lady Victoria Manners. The embroidered cover features the title, author, and illustrator at the top-right with a row of flowers each springing from their own blossom at the bottom of the page. Yellow background with two book covers. The first book cover is for the original imprinting of “The Sea Around Us” by Rachel L. Carson (1951). The cover is green with sea creatures surrounding a darker area in the center where the book title and author are written in white. The second book cover is for the 70th Anniversary edition of “Gift from the Sea” by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1955). The cover is light blue but fades to white in the center where there is the outline of a conch shell and the title printed under; the author is listed at the top of the cover. Yellow background with two book covers. The first cover is for Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s “Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead” (2025). The art consists of water-colored dots that flow across the cover. The title is printed in blue amid a white circle in the middle of the cover, and the author’s name is printed at the top in white. The second cover is for “Margins: A Naturalist Meets Long Island Sound” by Mary Parker Buckles (1997). It is white with a skinny-outlined box that surrounds all of the cover’s contents. In the box is the title and author printed in skinny, underlined text and an image of fishing nets set in the water at sunset.
August 7, 2025 at 7:31 PM
citapress.bsky.social
Polish writer and Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk on how she views literary translators as her co-creators in her work.

From a 2019 interview with the Nobel Foundation @nobelprize.bsky.social

#womenintranslation #WITMonth 📚💙
August 6, 2025 at 7:05 PM
citapress.bsky.social
“I’m a better translator than any LLM precisely because I haven’t read millions of books…”

Cita’s recent Bulletin “...language as a right to being…” features @dsparis.bsky.social on AI and translating Nellie Bly; María Luisa Puga, Pita Amor, Josefina Vicens; Cita Press in person; & more...

#WIT 📚💙
"...language as a right to being."
Daniel Saldaña París on AI and translating Nellie Bly; María Luisa Puga, Pita Amor, Josefina Vicens; Cita Press in person; & more...
citapress.substack.com
August 5, 2025 at 8:00 PM
citapress.bsky.social
We join in highlighting women in translation this month 📚💙

Mizumura’s scholarship focuses on the global dominance of the English language and what it means for global literature as a whole. ⬇️

#WITMonth #WomenInTranslation
citapress.bsky.social Cita Press @citapress.bsky.social · Jul 23
Writer Minae Mizumura (b. 1951) on the importance of literature.

Mizumura moved to the United States as a child. She moved back to Japan after her graduate study, where she achieved her long held goal to write literature in Japanese.

#WomenInTranslation 📚💙
Yellow text and a faded design of a hand resting on an open book over a black background. The text reads: "Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place. And if there is no answer, only literature can point to the impossibility of ever finding one." Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English (2008), translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter in collaboration with the author (2015). Image: Odilon Redon via The MET
August 4, 2025 at 10:54 PM
citapress.bsky.social
Nos complace anunciar la publicación de la nueva traducción al español de Diez días en un manicomio, por Daniel Saldaña París @dsparis.bsky.social para el Cita Press Literary Translation & Technology project. 🔗⬇️

Prólogo: Mikita Brottman

Portada y ilustraciones: Dajia Zhou

📚💙 #womenintranslation
Blue book cover for the Spanish translation of Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly with an illustration of a group of people looking into a chained box with an eye above. Stamps on the cover denote that it is now available for free online.
July 30, 2025 at 8:34 PM
citapress.bsky.social
🐈WRITERS AND CATS 🐱
Helen Gurley Brown and Samantha

Helen Gurley Brown was noted to have loved cats all her life, at times even including her cat’s paw print with her signature 🐾

📚💙
Black and white photo of Helen Gurley Brown, a young white woman with her neck-length hair pinned back on each side, in front of a typewriter with her Burmese cat, Samantha, sitting on the table and reaching her head out curiously to the camera.
July 29, 2025 at 7:05 PM
citapress.bsky.social
Writer, poet, teacher Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938) speaks about the emotional toll of finishing a novel.

In this interview from 1980, just a week before the election of Ronald Reagan, Oates speaks about the influences of political terrorism and discontent as well as her creative process.

📚💙
July 28, 2025 at 3:41 PM
Reposted by Cita Press
sarannmcd.bsky.social
“…there is nothing more transformative for a person’s discernment than the exercise of inhabiting the language of another…if we renounce the gesture of placing ourselves in the other’s words, we renounce much more than a mode of text production.” @dsparis.bsky.social
citapress.bsky.social Cita Press @citapress.bsky.social · Jul 25
For the project, París created a new Spanish translation of Nellie Bly's Ten Days in a Mad-House. In the process, he experimented with LLMs, comparing algorithmically-informed choices with his own aesthetic and political considerations.

You can read his essay, trans. by Christina MacSweeney, here🔗
Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words - Asymptote
At the beginning of last year, I responded to a call for applications posted by Cita Press—a publishing house that focuses on works in the public domain, written by women—under the title &...
www.asymptotejournal.com
July 26, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Reposted by Cita Press
siobhandowling.bsky.social
"Making things easier is the oft-stated aim of an industry that privileges products over processes, but it is in the process of struggling with difficulties, turning them over in one’s mind for days, that translators transcend the mechanical aspects of their work to become artists."
citapress.bsky.social Cita Press @citapress.bsky.social · Jul 25
Read @dsparis.bsky.social's new essay “Translation, A.I. and the Political Weight of Words,” trans. by Christina MacSweeney, in Asymptote’s new issue: “What A.I. Can’t Do.”🔗⬇️

Illustration by Daija Zhou for Cita’s (free!) edition of Ten Days in a Mad-House/Diez días en un manicomio by Nellie Bly

📚💙
Blue and white design with an illustration of a large group of late-1800s women wearing hats and dresses standing under a tree (by Daija Zhou) and text reading: "Exactly how revolutionary is this new technology in terms of our profession?" Read "Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words" by Daniel Saldaña París in the ASYMPTOTE special feature "What AI Can't Do" -- out now!
July 27, 2025 at 7:53 AM
Reposted by Cita Press
litquake.org
PRE-FESTIVAL AMUSE-BOUCHE PT IV: Small Press Book Fair🤩

We're so excited to revive the Small Press Book Fair at Yerba Buena Gardens. Come browse the best in local literature set to a day of poetry readings from Litquake Out Loud. FREE!

📅Sep 28, 11–4
➡️Participating vendors: bit.ly/44P1jJN
Litquake's Small Press Book Fair | Litquake
Our book fair is back, with a whole new lineup of the Bay Area's best small presses and journals!
bit.ly
July 27, 2025 at 1:00 AM
citapress.bsky.social
Read @dsparis.bsky.social's new essay “Translation, A.I. and the Political Weight of Words,” trans. by Christina MacSweeney, in Asymptote’s new issue: “What A.I. Can’t Do.”🔗⬇️

Illustration by Daija Zhou for Cita’s (free!) edition of Ten Days in a Mad-House/Diez días en un manicomio by Nellie Bly

📚💙
Blue and white design with an illustration of a large group of late-1800s women wearing hats and dresses standing under a tree (by Daija Zhou) and text reading: "Exactly how revolutionary is this new technology in terms of our profession?" Read "Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words" by Daniel Saldaña París in the ASYMPTOTE special feature "What AI Can't Do" -- out now!
July 25, 2025 at 7:29 PM
citapress.bsky.social
Writer Minae Mizumura (b. 1951) on the importance of literature.

Mizumura moved to the United States as a child. She moved back to Japan after her graduate study, where she achieved her long held goal to write literature in Japanese.

#WomenInTranslation 📚💙
Yellow text and a faded design of a hand resting on an open book over a black background. The text reads: "Science may explain how humans came into being, but it has no answer to the slippery question of how humans should live. Only literature makes it possible to pose such questions in the first place. And if there is no answer, only literature can point to the impossibility of ever finding one." Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English (2008), translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter in collaboration with the author (2015). Image: Odilon Redon via The MET
July 23, 2025 at 7:29 PM
citapress.bsky.social
🐈WRITERS AND CATS 🐱
Elsa Gidlow and her cats

“I have learned much from my cat friends, been encouraged and inspired by their gentle-to-fierce resources for survival. It is the same spirit in women that men through the ages have tried to tame, to conquer” - Gidlow, "Elsa, I Came with My Songs"

📚💙
Black and white image of Elsa Gidlow, an older white woman with short hair wearing a white, long-sleeve shirt and light pants, sitting on a wooden porch with a Burmese cat on her lap. Black and white image of Elsa Gidlow, a young white woman in a white dress with long, kept-back hair, standing and holding a dark cat in her arms in front of her home.
July 22, 2025 at 3:42 PM
citapress.bsky.social
A small sample of publications that brought words and design together to build community, spread, knowledge, and promote art in the face of mainstream silence.🧵⬇️

📚💙
Purple Slide with text reading “Publishing Milestones to know for Pride” and a black and white image of four women, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Cherrie Moraga, and Audre Lorde, standing beside each other, holding hands, and wearing shirts that say “KITCHEN TABLE PRESS.”
July 21, 2025 at 4:07 PM
citapress.bsky.social
Virginia Woolf on life – and what a novelist is trying to capture about the human experience, in the essay “Modern Fiction” (first published in 1919).

Stay tuned for exciting news related to Woolf x Cita Press!!

📚💙
Design of a radiating purple circle with limb-like shadows passing in-front of and through it. Text over the design reads: "Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." Virginia Woolf
July 17, 2025 at 3:21 PM
citapress.bsky.social
🐈WRITERS AND THEIR CATS 🐱
Alice Walker and Frida

“When it is bedtime I pick her up, cuddle her, whisper what a sweet creature she is, how beautiful and wonderful, how lucky I am to have her in my life and that I will love her always.”
- Walker, in On Cats: An Anthology

📚💙
Black and white image of Alice Walker, a Black woman wearing a necklace and button-up blouse, holding Frida, her long-haired calico cat. Walker is happy; Frida is not.
July 16, 2025 at 3:31 PM