Advanced Search Your Shopping Bag
About Us
South End Press is a nonprofit, collectively run book publisher with more than 250 titles in print. Since our founding in 1977, we have tried to meet the needs of readers who are exploring, or are already committed to, the politics of radical social change.

> Read more about South End Press

Historic Partnership, Award Winning Books

Historic Partnership, Award Winning Books

South End Press, Leading Independent Publishing House, Enters Historic Partnership with Medgar Evers College/CUNY

South End Author Frank Wilderson's Incognegro Receives 2010 NEA Literature Fellowship and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

New York, NY - December 09, 2009
 This fall a historic partnership was realized when South End Press--one of the country's oldest independent, nonprofit presses--established residence at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. Through the joint efforts of the College's Center for Black Literature and DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy, the 32-year-old press opened a new editorial office at the College's MetroTech Center satellite in Downtown Brooklyn. (New phone: 718-874-0089)

Both South End Press and Medgar Evers College emerged from a broad legacy of educating and distributing educational resources generated by often marginalized communities. This shared tradition provides the foundation for this mutually beneficial partnership, which will help sustain one of the country's most respected presses in a manner that fully preserves the Press's autonomy while expanding both material and intellectual resources available to students, faculty, staff, and the larger communities served by Medgar Evers College. Established in 1977, South End Press has over 250 titles in print, reflecting the Press's commitment to publish on a broad range of issues from diverse perspectives. South End authors include bell hooks, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Winona LaDuke, Andrea Smith, Manning Marable, Cherríe Moraga, Arundhati Roy, Vandana Shiva, Howard Zinn, and Frank B. Wilderson, III author of the critically-acclaimed book Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (winner, 2008 American Book Award), and the recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.

Alex Straaik, a South End Press editor/publisher, states, "We are tremendously excited and grateful to Medgar Evers College for their generosity in assisting our efforts to sustain this press. That said, we are not only interested in ensuring the sustainability of South End Press. Like the extraordinary students, faculty, staff, and administrators at Medgar Evers College, South End Press is most interested not in what we have been bequeathed, but in making sure that this legacy endures."

Dr. Brenda M. Greene, executive director of the Center for Black Literature, adds, "Through this collaboration, South End Press will work with the Centers and Medgar Evers College in fulfilling its mission to develop the next generation of leaders and community change-agents. South End's activities will include working with faculty to publish books; conducting publishing workshops, lectures, and authors' programs; providing student internships in editing, marketing, production and research; and working with the Centers to develop educational programs in printing and publishing. We look forward to the benefits that this collaboration will bring to the overall academic goals and programs of the Centers."

In March 2010, the Press will collaborate with the Center for Black Literature to develop pre-conference programming for the Tenth National Black Writers Conference and provide direct marketing support for the conference. Prior to the conference, Medgar Evers College will officially welcome South End Press to campus with a presidential reception.

Innovative Strategies for Sustainability
This partnership, along with the Press's Community Supported Publishing (CSP) movement, is among the innovative strategies the Press is using to sustain independent publishing while weathering tough economic times. "Especially in the wake of the consolidation of publishing. When one of our movement presses falls, where does the work go?" asks Jocelyn Burrell, a South End Press editor/publisher since 2004. Modeled after the widely successful Community Supported Agricultural (CSA) movement, South End's CSP movement is a grassroots, membership-driven subscription, with CSP members contributing $20 per month for regular deliveries from South End Press (books and other media instead of fruit and veggies). The CSP movement frees the Press from strict reliance on the caprice of holiday shopping and the Wal-Mart wars by helping to normalize cash flow with grassroots support--sustaining the Press as it supports new books and the movements they advance.

Roger L. Green, executive director of the DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy, explains, "The disappearance of venues for publicly distributing the ideas and experiences that advance social justice--witness the shuttering of Kitchen Table and Third Woman Press--is a powerful reminder of why it is crucial to protect and sustain independent political publishers, and makes it clear why Medgar Evers College, itself an important organ for progressive thought and action, would want to partner with South End Press. It is not only the ideas that are advanced by small presses that are important to preserve. It is the presses themselves."

As a small, independent, and politically radical publishing house, the Press is faring better than expected during the economic crisis. Sales were down last year but only by 12.8%, which is less than a point greater than the 12% sales decline seen by industry giants. And the Press is optimistic about what the next years will bring now that it's closer to many of its allies in the NYC independent publishing, academic, movement-scholar, and activist communities. With the CSP movement growing, South End Press will continue to expand the program, its audience-reach, and the all-volunteer South End Press Street Team through literary events and community involvement which will assist in developing new partnerships and movements, as well as the indie press grassroots funding base. As Burrell notes, "We realize that South End's history and successes are not of a single movement press, but the inheritance and continuing evolution of a broad assembly of movements for social justice."

News and Events