A Love Note to Our Literary Ancestors: Then and Now

On a crisp November evening, encircled by a lively cadre of writers, agents, publishers, editors, and philanthropists, I stood in a brightly lit mahoganyand rosewood-adorned architectural studio overlooking Madison Avenue. As I waited at the bar for a tumbler of pinot noir, I watched the guests catch up over drinks and dart over to newly acclaimed writers to congratulate them on their recent publications while reaching for the hors d'oeuvres being passed around.

The pleasant din quieted suddenly when the warm yet stately New Orleanian memoirist and soon-to-be National Book Award–winner Sarah Broom began speaking. Broom reflected on how being awarded the 2016 Creative Nonfiction Grant from the Whiting Foundation had impacted her life and work. She tied her writing process to stories about her family's home, history, and resilience in a complex and oft mythologized city. As The Yellow House author named the 2019 Whiting Award winners amid enthusiastic applause, I looked at the bookshelves lining the walls and then at the hopeful faces of this year's victors, including Channing Gerard Joseph, author of House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens.

In celebrating these writers, I thought about Broom's and Joseph's relationship to other authors from underrepresented communities who have received this award, including Feminist Press author Brontez Purnell. Contemplating the lineage of those who paved the way for rooms like this to showcase and support intersectional literature, diverse insurgent voices, and LGBTQ authors of color, I wondered what our literary ancestors would think about this moment.

As I connected with an author whose debut book with the Feminist Press springboarded them into a publishing juggernaut, I remembered an anonymous voice mail I received during my first week at the helm of the Feminist Press in July 2017: "Our ancestors planted seeds and you are the flowering of their dreams." I'd jotted the message down on a fuchsia Post-it and had tucked it away in my wallet for safekeeping.

This anonymous message helped support my entry into an industry that is notoriously homogenous and systemically less accessible for communities of color; it is this type of intergenerational support, too, that Layla Saad describes in her book Me and White Supremacy (2020) as being a "good ancestor" in the present. As I surveyed the room, I saw editors, writers, and others who had been touched by the transformative magic that brought me to the Feminist Press as a reader when my mother first handed me a copy of the foundational Black feminist text But Some of Us Are Brave. It was then that I thought about how that inaugural voice mail shaped my intentions and goals for my service as the youngest and first woman of color executive director and publisher of FP. At a time when Pew Research studies show that the person most likely to read a book in any form today is a college-educated Black woman (Bump 2014), it feels fitting that this granddaughter of sharecroppers—whose Carolinian ancestors fought for the right to read and preserve their language and stories—is midwifing books that document our past and carry on our lineage of imagining a more powerful, complicated, innovative, and inclusive feminist future.

As I walked home later that night, I unraveled the Post-it note that the memory of that auspicious voice mail inspired. "Be a good ancestor because your ancestors dreamed you and this moment into existence. What will be your imprint? (Pun intended!)" In the spirit of the women and allies who banded together, shared their resources, and offered their time to create a space for marginalized voices to amplify our voices, unearth "lost" narratives, and speak truth to power, I reflect on this idea as a guidepost every day. How are the books we're publishing speaking to the next generation? Who is missing from our list and from the room? What are our books, programs, and leadership structure saying about who we are, and about how we have or have not evolved to the people who will read our texts fifty years from...