“From the ‘Essential Angel’ to Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press: A Genealogy of Intersectional Publishing Policies,” in Beyond Genders. Intersezionalità tra teoria e pratiche. Sguardi interdisciplinari (Vol. 2), a cura di Norma De Piccoli e Chiara Rollero, Torino, CIRSDe – Centro Interdisciplinare di Ricerche e Studi delle Donne e di Genere, 2024, pp. 226-238.

This essay traces a connection between the pioneering experience of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, a feminist press founded and run by Black and lesbian activists Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde in 1981, and some observations made by Russian Jewish author Tillie (Lerner) Olsen from the early 1960s and later collected in her seminal non-fiction volume Silences (1978). Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was originated to publish works by women writers of color and/or lesbian, to redress the difficulty of access such writers had on the publishing market; a few decades earlier, Olsen had similarly lamented the difficulties women would face to become published authors, introducing the figure of the “essential angel” as “the angel who must assume the physical responsibilities for daily living, for the maintenance of life” (34), all the while trying to create the conditions for an equally essential literary production. This essay looks at the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press experience from the perspective of social class, highlighting the similarities between the publishing house’s mission statement to Tillie Olsen’s conceptualization of the “essential angel”; the latter is interpreted as a paradigm which, in parallel and in combination with the intersectional one, is instrumental to decode overlapping, multiple factors of oppression. I argue that Smith’s and Lorde’s publishing project implicitly connects with (and pushes beyond) Tillie Olsen’s, by claiming “essentiality” (also identified with care work) not merely as a set of material limitations, but as a distinctive and enriching feature in the work of women writers of color.