Featuring Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Ching-In Chen
Please join Kelsey Street Press to celebrate our 50th Anniversary on Saturday, October 26, at 3pm.
Light refreshments & Kelsey Street Press books will be available.
260 Utah St
San Francisco
ADA accessibility via Potrero Street (255A Potrero)
Questions? info@kelseystreetpress.org
Kelsey Street Press was founded in 1974 to address the marginalization of women writers by small press and mainstream publishers, encouraging women to write directly from their own creative imperatives. Its catalog includes Erica Hunt, Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, Camille Roy, Cecilia Viçuna, Etel Adnan, Fanny Howe, Barbara Guest, and the first books of Renee Gladman, Bhanu Kapil, Myung Mi Kim and Andrea Abi-Karam. The Press centers the pleasure of the written page and books that can be held and carried.
With fifty years of publishing, the Press remains true to its commitment to publish a wide range of feminist voices, including the work of trans and genderqueer authors as well as its ongoing commitment to publish books by BIPOC and queer/trans authors, including its QTBIPOC Book Prize.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge was born in Beijing and grew up in Massachusetts. She is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including five from Kelsey Street Press: Sphericity; Four Year Old Girl; Endocrinology (a collaboration with the artist Kiki Smith); NEST; and Concordance. Her other books include Hello, the Roses; Empathy; I Love Artists; and A Treatise on Stars. Her collaborations include works in theater, dance, music, and the visual arts. She won the 2021 Bollinger Prize for Poetry from Yale University and is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Before Columbus American Book Awards, two Asian American Writer’s Workshop Awards, and a PEN West award. She lives in northern New Mexico and in New York City.
Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems and recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. They are a Massage Parlor Outreach Project core member and have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC and Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice.