Aunt Lute Books is a multicultural feminist press whose mission is to "publish literature by women whose voices have been traditionally under-represented in mainstream and small press publishing" and "distribute literature that expresses the true complexity of women’s lives and the possibilities for personal and social change." The publisher has a stated aim to embrace the opportunity to work with and support first-time authors.

Publishing history

In 1982, Aunt Lute Book Company was founded by Barb Wieser and Joan Pinkvoss in Iowa

Iowa

Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New...

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Aunt Lute merged with another feminist publisher, Spinsters Ink in 1986, and the two organizations published jointly for several years in San Francisco under the name Spinsters/Aunt Lute. In 1990 the Aunt Lute Foundation was established as a non profit publishing program, and in 1992, Spinsters Ink was purchased by lesbian feminist philanthropist

Philanthropist

A philanthropist is someone who engages in philanthropy; that is, someone who donates his or her time, money, and/or reputation to charitable causes...

 Joan Drury and moved to Minneapolis.

Aunt Lute continues to operate independently as a nonprofit to the present day.

Titles

Aunt Lute has published a number of high profile feminist and lesbian authors, including Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist.-Life:...

 (The Cancer Journals

The Cancer Journals

The Cancer Journals is a 1980 book of non-fiction by Audre Lorde. It deals with her struggle with breast cancer.-Summary:The book consists of an introduction and three chapters, each featuring passages from her diary....

), Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

In the first chapter of Borderlands , Gloria E. Anzaldúa uses striking imagery to illustrate the pain the border has brought to the mestizos by both dividing their culture and fencing them in – trapping them on one side. She then exemplifies the most important reason the deadly border exists: it is...

), Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz is a lesbian essayist, poet, activist and academic, born in 1945 in Brooklyn, New York.-Early life:Her grandparents emigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe, Poland and Russia....

, LeAnne Howe

LeAnne Howe

LeAnne Howe is an author and scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. An enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Howe's work has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies. Her book Shell Shaker received the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book...

 (Shell Shaker

Shell Shaker

Shell Shaker is a novel by writer and playwright LeAnne Howe, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. The novel is notable for the way it interweaves two tales of murder involving flawed Choctaw political leaders set over 200 years apart in the mid 18th century and 1991, connected...

, winner of the 2002 Before Columbus American Book Award and Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story), Alice Walker

Alice Walker

Alice Malsenior Walker is an American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender...

, and Paula Gunn Allen

Paula Gunn Allen

Paula Gunn Allen was a Native American poet, literary critic, lesbian activist, and novelist.Born Paula Marie Francis in Albuquerque, Allen grew up in Cubero, New Mexico, a Spanish-Mexican land grant village bordering the Laguna Pueblo reservation...

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Call Me Woman, the autobiography of South Africa

South Africa

The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

n activist Ellen Kuzwayo

Ellen Kuzwayo

Nnoseng Ellen Kate Kuzwayo was a women's rights activist and politician in South Africa. She was president of the African National Congress Youth League in the 1960s. In 1994 she was elected to the first post-apartheid South African Parliament...

, Radmila Manojlovic Zarkovic's anthology, I Remember: Writings by Bosnian Women Refugees, and Cherry Muhanji's Lambda Award winning novel Her are all been published by Aunt Lute. Other Aunt Lute titles include the first U.S. collection of Filipina/Filipina American women writers and the first collection of Southeast Asian women writers, as well as a number of translated texts.

Awards

Aunt Lute Books was the 2004 - 2005 and the 2005 - 2006 Best of the Small Presses Award granted by Standards, an International Cultural Studies

Cultural studies

Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...

Magazine.