cita is a library and press devoted to highlighting, publishing and promoting works written by women. We pair contemporary authors and designers with open access texts, and make carefully designed books available for free!
In Spanish, “cita” is the word for appointment, quotation, and date. It is also the diminutive suffix for feminine nouns, mujer is woman; mujercita is little woman.
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Manifesto:
- To elevate the work of those who first addressed gender inequality
- To use open-source resources and actively credit them
- To maintain the content in open-access platforms, licenses and formats
- To give free access to the content
- To make visible and celebrate the work of contributors
- To pair classic literature with contemporary open scholarship and design
- To be committed to intersectionality
- To be participatory, crowdsourced and open to new voices and collaborations
Advisory Board: Janneke Adema, Vicky Checo, Katherine Maher, Jessica Meyerson, & Mindy Seu.
What: Carefully designed public-domain books written by women in free, contemporary editions for print and web.
How: cita is a collaborative labor of love between designers and writers that relies on public-domain writings and open-source texts, fonts, code, and images. All the content of cita is either public-domain, or is licensed under Creative Commons License CC-NC-SA 4.0, meaning it’s free forever, and sharable for non-commercial purposes so long as you can share if you say who created it. For example, we use Bindery by Evan Brooks. For more details, check the collaborate page.
Why: Women authors have historically been underrepresented and underpublicized in the male-dominated, profit-driven publishing industry. We make these women writers’ works accessible to all, in free editions. While the work we have published so far is by women, we are interested in publishing work by writers whose genders have been historically marginalized in the publishing and literary landscape.
Who: cita is fiscally sponsored by Educopia and financially supported by the Mellon Foundation. Read more about Cita Press - Scaling Small, a three-year project project implementing new projects and funding models for the press. cita was created by Juliana Castro. cita's Editorial Director is Jessi Haley and our Designer is bex ya yolk. We work in collaboration with a growing list of contributors.