Newsroom

CALYX Press and Oregon State University Libraries and Press have been awarded a grant of $96,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize at-risk literature published through CALYX Press.

This grant enables important literary works from the last 50 years of the feminist movement to be transformed into openly licensed e-book formats. CALYX, founded in 1976, is one of the nation's oldest feminist presses, and has published diverse authors including Julia Alvarez, Chitra Divakaruni, Barbara Kingsolver, Sharon Olds, Linda Hogan, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

The project goal is to foster wider readership and a renewed interest in the impact of the small independent press on national and international feminist movements. Taking advantage of contemporary e-book technology, the project will digitize and distribute out-of-print texts by authors now central to contemporary feminist literature.

"Feminist presses of the last 50 years, including CALYX Press, have been a fundamental part of the cultural discourse," said Alicia Bublitz, managing editor of CALYX Press, "and we are dedicated to preserving those voices in a digital world.

 "The work of these presses is disappearing, and maintaining their foundational texts is essential for scholarship, history and art," she said. "This project is an acknowledgment of our great debt to these often controversial, always passionate, and incredibly powerful leaders."

 According to Korey Jackson, the Gray Family Chair for Innovative Library Services, and Jane Nichols, OSU instruction and emerging technologies librarian, the work was a great connection between CALYX's independent lens and feminist literary connections, and the library's dedicated infrastructure and support for open access.

 "Our hope is to inspire new audiences and foster new readers of feminist literature by making these texts openly available," Jackson said.