About the Small Press Traffic Archives
The past half century has seen a groundswell of independent publishing projects, poetry readings, workshops, and interdisciplinary programs, all helping to form today’s small press culture. Since 1974, Small Press Traffic has been at the heart of this dynamic activity — spanning genre, geography, and generations — and perpetuating itself through social connections and friendships outside of academia or literary markets. We are fortunate to steward a growing compendium of physical, digitized, and born-digital materials that represent these practices. With gratitude for the dedicated work of staff, contractors, and volunteers, and supported by a transformational grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2023, SPT is making these historical and contemporary materials available to researchers and the public.
Small Press Traffic was founded in 1974, and has been based in the Castro, Noe Valley, and Mission neighborhoods of San Francisco. Like most community-centered organizations, SPT’s successes and challenges are intricately tied to the economic, social, and political times it has lived through — including feminist and gay liberation struggles, the Latino/Chicano movements, Occupy, various student movements, Black Lives Matter, resistance against ongoing gentrification and displacement, and more. SPT’s Archives reflect the writing, publishing, and presentations of poets, writers, artists, collectives, and grassroots organizations throughout these times who remain interconnected and self-sustaining via collaborative, social, and aesthetic networks.
Take a look around! We’ve got a catalog of the books and ephemera housed in our Print Collection Reading Room, audio/visual recordings, a comprehensive list of SPT’s past programs, a collection of oral history interviews, and special SPT projects. Behind the scenes, we’re developing our organizational papers, files, and correspondences. Like everything SPT does, our Archives are community-dependent and ever-evolving, please keep visiting for updates, progress, and more rare, small press, and independent items that will be added to our archives over time.
TEAM
Peggy Tran-Le: Archives Consultant
Willow Germs: Metadata Information Architect
Michelle Thomas: Project Manager
Noah Ross: Print Collection Lead
Andrew Kenower: Audio Collection Lead
Eric Sneathen: Oral History Lead
Owen Hill: Print Archives Acquisition Support
Liam Curley: Organizational Papers Support
Companion-Platform: Web Developer
Thank you to Lara Durback, Claire Grossman, Avren Keating, Gerry Torn, Theadora Walsh, and Thomas Ziemer for cataloging support.
