Thumbnail associated with publisher map, displaying some of the publishers we collect from. Link goes to interactive map on ArcGIS.
Alongside the celebration of the many, phenomenal books we display, we’ve also made material available about what kinds of publishers UC Berkeley Library has been collecting from across the continent.
Let me (Bee, the Lit Librarian) know if you have questions or note that there is information missing. Our thanks for to the many artists, authors, and magazine editors who’ve made this possible.
Since its inception in January 2021, Abalone Mountain Press (https://www.abalonemountainpress.com) has published several phenomenal compilations of poetry and zines. Amber McCrary, the founder, operates the press on operates on the traditional lands of the Akimel O’odham.[1]
To delight, this semester (Spring 2025), UC Berkeley’s Doe Library put in an order for five of Abalone Mountain Press’s recent publications. The chapbooks, anthology, and zines will be located in Doe Library’s main stacks.
Taté Walker and Ohíya Walker, The Trickster Riots (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022).
Kinsale and Alice Mao, Hummingbird Heart, Pink (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022).
Take a look at these or other Abalone Mountain Press books in our UC Berkeley Library.
Additional Material
Several of these authors contributed to The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature. You can find an interview with Amber McCrary about the Press in the September 2022 issue of Poetry.
Insert Press was found in 2005 by Mathew Timmons to focus on interdisciplinary and/or hybrid works.[1] Initially, Insert Press focused on poetry in chapbook form, but over the following decade turned to increasingly toward “translation, poetics, artist books.”[2]
Founded by Malcolm Margolin in 1974, Heyday (https://www.heydaybooks.com/) is an established California independent publisher based out of Berkeley. They offer material focused on topics such as social justice and supporting Californian Indian cultural renewal.
While not focused exclusively on literature, they often Heyday has released beautiful books looking at California’s environment and people. Their output includes exciting memoirs as well as contemplations of writing.
Kaya Press (https://kaya.com/) has been making space for voices in the Asian and Pacific Islander diasporic writers in the United States since 1994, when it was founded in New York City. Establishing itself as a “premier publisher of cutting-edge” literature, the Press moved to in USC Dornsife’s Department of American Studies and Ethnicity in Los Angeles in 2012 where it has continued releasing phenomenal material.[1]
The Press not only releases excellent novels and poetry, but also participates in book fairs, contributes to community activity, hosts author readings, and more.[2] Readers can find information about their events on their Instagram page.
You can find the majority of the Press’ catalog through the (UC Library Search) and access them in either in the UC Berkeley Main Stacks or the Ethnic Studies Library’s shelves.
Red points show Doe Library and the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library building locations. Check out the UC Berkeley Library locations and Affiliate Libraries as a Google Map.
Two Line Press, a press line for the Center for the Art of Translations, concentrates on translations of phenomenal fiction from around the world. Oliver Sears initially founded the Two Lines journal (UC Catalog Search for journal) in 1993 to focus on the art of translation and acknowledge the hard, incredible work of the translators.[1] In 2000, Sears and a team of wonderful collaborators launched the Center for the Art of Translation (CAT) out of San Francisco both to run the journal and start the Calico Series for books.[2]
As of the writing of this post, the press is reaching toward 100 translations of books from Arabic, Czech, Finish, Macedonian, Swahili, Spanish, Thai, and more. Readers can take a look at their catalog at https://www.catranslation.org/books/.
You can find more about Two Lines Press’ events on their Instagram page. Note that as of the writing of this post, they have a series of events in both New York City and in San Francisco! The ones in San Francisco include book events such as Mary Jo Bang on Dante’s Paradiso with Tess Taylor (information) and participation in the Litquake Small Press Book (September 28).
Recent Titles
Readers are encouraged to check out these recent titles from UC Berkeley Library!
One of the amazing, small presses that we’ve acquired material from is Mammoth Publications (https://mammothpublications.net). Mammoth was founded in 2003 and is located in Healdsburg, CA. It was initially founded to provide a space for poets including Eddie Two-Rivers (Wikipedia) to release their work. Authors Thomas Pecore Weso and Denise Low served as co-publishers until 2023, releasing two-to-four books and/or chapbooks a year. Denise Low still heads Mammoth, continuing to release excellent works of poetry, memoirs, and more.
The press prioritizes Indigenous and regional authors.
Recent Mammoth Books
I encourage you to take a look at some of UC Berkeley’s recent acquisition of Mammoth Publication’s books, including:
To my usual delight with speculative fiction, the Hugo awards have been announced! These controversial awards raise lots of questions about voice, audience, and the politics of publication. Nonetheless, they are usually worth a gander as awesome literature. I, for one, adore a couple of these authors.
Best Novel
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey, Hodderscape UK)
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit US, Tor UK)
We are delighted to provide information on the Spring 2025 Digital Humanities Faire at UC Berkeley. The continuation of more than a decade of tradition, these DH Faires are designed to celebrate the broad, interdisciplinary digital humanities projects at UC Berkeley.
Keynote
dana boyd is presenting “Data are Made, Not Found” on Wednesday, April 23, 2025 5-6:30pm, Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, Studio 310 (for more on the talk).
Poster Display:
Tuesday and Wednesday, April 22 and 23, 2025, Poster Display, Doe Library 2nd floor Reference Hall (see attached image with star).
The Gold Start shows the location of the Doe Library, 2nd floor Reference Hall
Many of us, alongside reading poetry and novels or travel narratives, want to know about the context in which the author lived. Who were their families? Did they have a specific person of whom they dreamed when they wrote about love? Understanding the author can give us a better understanding of their meaning, their focus, and their world.
Unsurprisingly, I’d recommend starting with what other scholars have written. If those books don’t exist, or I am after a deeper understanding, I would start looking into what I could sketch out about the author and then look for unpublished papers in archival collections or other repositories using search interfaces such as ArchiveGrid or ArchiveFinder.
The Case Study: Angelina Weld Grimké
Portrait of Angelina W. Grimké from Negro Poets and their Poems (1923) via Wikimedia. | Public Domain.
For the purposes of this exploration, I’m going to look at one of my many favorite poets: Angelina Weld Grimké (Wikipedia). This poet, born in 1880 in Boston, wrote poignant poems about life and love, many of which were published in the 1910s. They died in 1958 in New York City.
Based on that information, I expect Grimké to have possibly written and received letters to and from family and publishers; to maybe have kept account books or diaries; and possibly to appear in or have created family papers.
There are other kinds of sources that might exist for our purposes as well, but I’m sticking to these for now.
Looking for Unpublished Materials
Unpublished material such as letters is usually held by archives; historical societies/museums; estates; or family/friends. The latter two can be a harder reach, but the first two usually try to let researchers know what they hold. With that aim, many archives upload their finding aids (here’s information from Bancroft Library about what a finding aid is) into collective search interfaces like ArchiveGrid and ArchiveFinder. To find additional ways to search archival collections, take a look at the Library Resource Guide History: Locating Archives.
To use either of those two databases, I usually recommend writing out a list of possible permutations of the person’s name. “Angelina Weld Grimké” might written as such, but it also might appear as:
Angelina Grimké
Angelina Weld Grimke
Angelina Grimke
Some English language search interfaces are designed to ignore accents, and some will fail a search if the characters in a name do not precisely mirror whatever a finding aid says.
Searching ArchiveGrid
OCLC runs this platform and, as far as library search interfaces go, I like it well enough. Do be aware that it sits behind a paywall and you must be logged in with your institution to use it.
Example of ArchiveGrid Landing Page from February 2025
Once I have the initial search page up, I usually start my search with the full, formal name; in this case (Angelina Weld Grimké) without quotation marks and with the accent over the “e.”
In this case, I got two results, one of which was the “Weld-Grimké family papers.” When I use the link to the University of Michigan’s finding aid, however, I find out that the collection, substantial at 14 linear feet, focuses on Angelina Weld Grimké’s grandparents, one of whom was abolitionist Angelina Grimké.
Example of ArchiveGrid Search Results screen from February 2025
The second result, relating to scholar and poet Akasha Hull, is actually more on point as Hull wrote about Angelina Weld Grimké. Based on the collection listed in New York Public Library’s finding aid, however, material about Angelina Weld Grimké is likely to be sparse as the “Scope and arrangement” section note that the collection covers a significant number of topics and the “Detailed description” only mentions Grimké once.
At this point, I ran the other permutations of the name and didn’t get any other relevant collections. So, I move on to the next resource.
Using ArchiveFinder
ProQuest runs ArchiveFinder and I am not a big fan of their interface, largely because of the layout. The point and goal of the interface is much the same, but different archives/repositories subscribe and use different interfaces, which means I need to search both for a wider results list.
So, I start with the same name and search for (Angelina Weld Grimké).
Example of ArchiveFinder Search Results screen from February 2025
The results here are much more directly on topic. I still get the Michigan result for the Weld family papers at the top. The following results, however, are new and include a collection called “Grimké, Angelina Weld” AND “Angelina Weld Grimké papers, 1887-1958” both at Howard. A few of the other collections, including Fisk University’s “Negro collection” appear to hold potentially interesting information.
Reading a Relevant Finding Aid
In deciding which collections to focus on, I read the associated finding aids, focusing first on description and size. For Howard’s “Grimké, Angelina Weld” (finding aid) is 8 linear feet and includes drafts as well as published material.
Example of what unlabeled archival boxes can look like in 2025. | CC0
Given the highly-relevant description, I then skim the rest of the finding aid, which includes folder and box level description. That means Howard hasn’t recorded information about every piece of information in the box, but you can get a great sense of what’s there. For example, the description for Box 38, folder 15:
Series F Notebooks Box 38-15 French vocabulary exercises, writings of prose and poetry, and recipes
suggests that it contains some poetry along with other types of material. That might not give a clear sense of what poetry is in there or how it’s presented, but something of interest is there! Or, I think it will be. My personal, vague, castle-in-the-sky hope is that there will be poems about food scrawled on whatever recipe information is there.
If there are only one or two papers that are of interest, then I’d likely check the archive’s information about rights and reproductions. If they have options for digital copies, I might request the page or two.
In this case, there are hundreds of items associated with the collection. Most archives won’t copy that number of pages for staff and resource reasons. In consequence,
I would consider a visit to the archive and read their informational pages on the subject. In this case, Howard’s Moorland-Springarn Research Center page on the subject suggests writing to them before making a research appointment.
Additional Steps
There are several additional approaches to finding additional material about an author. For Grimké, I’d head to historical newspaper sets such as the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America.
I would also take a look for government records in Ancestry.com (public libraries often have subscriptions, for Berkeley see here), the National Records and Archives Association, as well as check historical association centers around where Grimké was born, lived, and died.
There is a lot one can do to find information. Whether one wants to take those steps often depends on your time, funding, and how relevant the information is to your research.
If I’m focused on one author, then I’d likely try to find out what’s out there. If I’m looking for 100 people, I wouldn’t do in-depth research into each but focus on specific types of information.
Let your literature librarian know if you’d like to talk about research strategies for you.
