Organization Mission Statement:
South End Press is an independent, nonprofit, collectively-run book publisher with more than 250 titles in print. Since our founding in 1977, we have met the needs of readers who are exploring, or are already committed to, the politics of radical social change. We are interested in manuscripts that are accessible to a wide range of political activists, while being useful to an academic audience.
Our goal is to publish books that encourage critical thinking and constructive action on the key political, cultural, social, economic, and ecological issues shaping life in the United States and in the world. We are especially committed to analyses that place socioeconomically disenfranchised, differently abled, and queer people, women, gender warriors, and communities of color at the center. We hope to provide a forum for a wide variety of democratic social movements, and provide an alternative to the products of corporate publishing.
From its inception, South End has organized itself as an egalitarian collective with decision-making arranged to share as equally as possible the rewards and stresses of running the business. Each collective member is responsible for core editorial and administrative tasks, and all collective members earn the same base salary. The Press also has made a practice of inverting the pervasive racial and gender hierarchies in traditional publishing houses; our staff has had a woman-identified majority since the mid-1980s, and people of color have comprised at least 50 percent of the collective since the mid-1990s. Our author list—which includes bell hooks, Arundhati Roy, Andrea Smith, Noam Chomsky, Winona LaDuke, Manning Marable, CherrÃe Moraga, and Howard Zinn—reflects the Press’s commitment to publish on diverse issues from diverse perspectives.
