Our memoirs are treasured by readers who want to learn more about social issues and appreciate great personal stories.
$34.95 Hardcover
96 pages • 7.5 x 8.5 inches
Color illustrated throughout
Date: 04/09/2024
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-232-1
A Tribute to the Power of Spiritual Practice, Creative Expression, and True Self-Acceptance
I Opened the Gate Laughing is the story of one woman’s journey to creative freedom through gardening and the teachings of Zen. Born in Japan, Mayumi Oda comes back to the practice of Buddhism at beautiful Green Gulch Farm retreat center in Northern California, where she finds a new tranquility and creative spirit through her pen, her brush, and her trowel to overcome the constraints of a traditional upbringing and the sadness of the end of a marriage. This enchanting book is a meditation on the search for inner peace and reawakening. awash with luscious prints and watercolors, beautifully designed, and filled with vivid stories and verse. I Opened the Gate Laughing is a resource for anyone seeking a slower pace, a sacred space, and a garden path.
Stuff: Instead of a Memoir
By Lucy R. Lippard
$44.95 Hardcover
8 x 8 inches
300 color images
Date: 09/12/2023
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-224-6
Colorfully written and illustrated memoir of the activist art writer Lucy Lippard.
Stuff: Instead of a Memoir is a short, abundantly illustrated autobiography of the American art writer, activist, and sometime curator Lucy R. Lippard. Describing tchotchkes, photographs, and art in her unpretentious New Mexico home, the author informally narrates key events and relationships in her 86-year-long, highly creative life, starting with her family roots and her childhood in New York, Louisiana, Virginia, and Maine. Through anecdotal and often humorous memories, we follow the author through her youth, adulthood, relationships, and her thirty-five years in New York City, where she organized dozens of exhibitions, authored hundreds of articles, and co-founded Heresies: A Feminist Journal of Art and Politics, the artist’s-book center Printed Matter, and activist artists group PAD/D. Lippard touches on the roles she played in Conceptual Art and the Feminist Art movement in the 1960s through the 1980s. Her accounts of more recent years focus on the art, landscape, culture, and communities of the American Southwest, where she moved in the early 1990s. This “anti-memoir” also mentions Lippard’s twenty-five books, but few of her many honors.
In the Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated?
By Arlene Goldbard
$34.95 Paperback
224 pages • 7 x 10 inches
15 color images
Date: 01/24/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-198-0
What does it mean to be educated? Through her evocative paintings and narrative, author Arlene Goldbard has portrayed eleven people whose work most influenced her—what she calls a camp of angels. She sees each as a brave messenger of love and freedom for a society that badly needs “uncolonized minds.” Goldbard describes how the learning from each changed the course of her life in essays that offer generative moments of a life in art and social change. She also reveals ways a dominant society tried to put a first-generation American from a socially marginal family in her place—and failed. Readers will learn about the author’s own self education, issues of formal higher education and its discontents, and the damage done by a society that prizes profits over people. Goldbard asks readers to consider the impact of credentialism on U.S. society and what we can do to set it right.
The “angels” whose work shaped Goldbard’s life are Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Paul Goodman, Doris Lessing, Alice Neel, Paulo Freire, Isaiah Berlin, John Trudell, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Jane Jacobs. Despite their many differences, each had the gift of questioning assumptions, looking beneath surfaces, and imagining without bounds. The author invites readers to scrutinize their own educations and to honor their own angels.
$19.95 Paperback
176 pages • 5.5 x 8.5 inches
5 black and white images
Date: 09/13/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-174-4
Also available as hardcover or eBook
The Book of Judith honors Judith Tannenbaum but also reflects, through both form and content, on the complexities of seeing both the parts and the whole. The book presents different aspects of Judith—poet, teaching artist, friend, mentor, colleague—through a collection of original poetry, prose, essay, illustration, and fiction from 33 contributors. In so doing, it echoes her own determination to perceive contradiction without judgment. For the next generation of teaching artists in Corrections and elsewhere, the book serves as an inspiration on the qualities needed to survive and thrive in a multi-faceted, ever-changing environment.
$22.95 Paperback
240 pages • 6 x 9 inches
10 black and white images
Date: 09/06/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-170-6
Also available as hardcover or eBook
Inherited Silence tells the story of beloved land in California’s Napa Valley. Author Louise Dunlap’s ancestors were among the first Europeans to claim ownership of traditional lands of the Wappo people during a period of genocide. They lived the dream of Manifest Destiny; their consciousness changing only gradually over the generations. Dunlap looks back into California’s and America’s history for the key to their silences and a way to heal the wounds of the land, its original people, and the harmful mind of the colonizer. Inherited Silence offers a way for every reader to evaluate their own current life actions and the lasting impact they can have on society and our planet.
$22.95 Paperback
240 pages • 5.5 x 8.5 inches
40 black and white images
Date: 08/23/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-178-2
Also available as hardcover or eBook
We Built a Village is both a memoir and a sociological analysis that describes the process of planning and building an early cohousing community in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the mid 1990s. The group set in motion a counterpoint between the physical spaces and the social configurations that would guide their lives together, even up to creative responses to the recent pandemic.
$30.00 Paperback
352 pages • 6 x 9 inches
59 black and white images
Date: 06/28/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-166-9
Also available as hardcover or eBook
Divining Chaos provides a personal memoir of eco-artist Aviva Rahmani. The story gives insight into her Trigger-Point theory thesis and unparalleled exclusivity to the moments in her life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led Rahmani to two seminal projects: Ghost Nets, restoring a coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands, and The Blued Trees Symphony, which applied the premises to challenge natural gas pipelines with a novel legal theory about land use, Rahmani shares intimate decisions that shaped her life’s work.
$30.00 Hardcover
240 pages • 5.83 x 8.27 inches
71 color images
Date: 04/12/2022
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-159-1
Also available as eBook
Artists in My Life is a collection of intimate and conversational accounts of the visual artists that have impacted the renowned poet activist Margaret Randall on her own journey as an artist. Each story offers insight into the artist’s life and work, and analyses the impact it had on Randall’s own work and its impact on the larger art community. The work strives to answer bigger questions about visual art as a whole and its lasting political influence on the world stage.
Randall’s hope was to show us ‘how the objects and places that move us breathe their life into ours.’ In this, she certainly succeeds. A heartwarming celebration of the author’s compelling life.
—Kirkus Reviews
My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Through each “object,” Randall uncovers another part of herself, starting in a museum in Amman, Jordan, and ending in the Latin American Studies Association in Boston. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit.
The earth and its people are inextricably intertwined; the fight for ecological sustainability cannot be won without a serious reckoning with racism, past and present.
—African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal
Carl Anthony is an environmental and social justice leader and the founder of Urban Habitat. His rich narrative describes both being at the mercy of racism, urban disinvestment, and environmental injustice as well as fighting against these forces with a variety of strategies. Now available on Audible.
Ann Snitow’s extraordinary gifts for friendship and organizing spill off the pages of this illuminating memoir, which lights up a formerly obscure but important aspect of our history.
—Alix Shulman
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ann Snitow takes us on a journey through East Central Europe, where she helps organize a growing feminist movement. Her reflections on embracing change offer us guidance in the time of an unprecedented pandemic.
Nasser’s tale of his art and its encounter with power is told with the poignant humour and devastatingly profound honesty that characterizes his life and his work.
—Syrus Samii, author of The Blue Flower of Forgiveness
Written in a simple direct style, Nasser Rahmaninejad’s memoir describes his fraught creative life as a theater director during the two great upheavals of Iranian history in the 20th century.
In this insightful memoir, disability activist LaSpina effortlessly shares how her personal experiences led to her activism, creating a compelling story that is both instructive and moving.
—Starred Booklist
Written as continuous narrative and in a subtle and intimate voice, Nadina LaSpina’s memoir is as captivating as a novel. It is one of the few disability memoirs to focus on activism, and one of the first by an immigrant.
Glendinning’s portraits are uniquely intimate even as they explore her subjects’ powerful conviction and passion for justice. In the Company of Rebels is one of the most profoundly moving books I’ve read in years.
—Margaret Randall, author of Exporting Revolution
Through a series of 43 vignettes, Chellis Glendinning creates a collective portrait of the activists she knew and worked with who raised and fought for issues of justice we’re still grappling with today.
. . . a book that will anger you, give you hope, and break your heart.
—Gloria Steinem
A two-person memoir by poets Spoon Jackson and Judith Tannenbaum—one a life prisoner, and the other his writing teacher—that explores education, prison, and which children our world nurtures and which it shuns. At the book’s core are two stories that speak up for human imagination, spirit, and the power of art.
Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People’s Power
By Ernest Thompson and Mindy Thompson Fullilove
Homeboy Came to Orange is an essential read for anyone who wants to organize for change in their towns, schools, churches or communities. It is a story that is at once inspiring, challenging, and unwavering.
—Terri Baltimore, Director of Community Engagement, Hill House Association
African American, labor union pioneer Ernest Thompson dedicated his life to organizing the powerless. This lively, illustrated personal narrative of his community organizing work shows the great contribution that people’s coalitions can make to the struggle for equality and freedom.
Sabra Moore has created a generous and wonderfully readable account of the women artists working in New York in these two vital decades of struggles and achievements.
—Ann Sutherland Harris, Professor Emeritus, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh
Illustrated throughout by a treasury of 950 color and black & white images of the art from this momentous period, artist Sabra Moore’s personal narrative takes readers through twenty-two years of activism in the women’s art movements in New York City during a period of great cultural change.
Conversations with Diego Rivera provides rare documentation of his confluence of politically egalitarian views and the arts.
—Hyperallergic
These intimate Sunday dialogues between journalist Alfredo Cardona Peña with Diego Rivera, surely the most influential Mexican artist of the twentieth century, show us the free-flowing mind of a man who was a legend in his own time.