Founded | 1980 |
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Founder | Frédérique Delacoste, Felice Newman and Mary Winfrey Trautmann |
Country of origin | United States |
Headquarters location | Jersey City, New Jersey |
Distribution | Publishers Group West |
Publication types | Books |
Imprints | Midnight Editions |
Official website | www |
Cleis Press is an independent publisher of books in the areas of sexuality, erotica, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, fiction, and human rights. The press was founded in 1980 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It later moved to California to San Francisco and was based out of Berkeley until its purchase by Start Media in 2014. It was founded by Frédérique Delacoste, Felice Newman and Mary Winfrey Trautmann who collectively financed wrote and published the press's first book Fight Back: Feminist Resistance to Male Violence in 1981. In 1987, they published Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry by Delacoste with Priscilla Alexander.
Over the years, Cleis Press has published nonfiction books by Susie Bright, Annie Sprinkle, Edmund White, Essex Hemphill, Gore Vidal, Christine Jorgensen, Matthue Roth, Patrick Califia, Violet Blue (author), Mark A. Michaels and Patricia Johnson and Tristan Taormino, among others. Fiction includes works by Achy Obejas, Stephen Elliott, Erastes (author), reissues of classic lesbian pulp fiction (including Ann Bannon's historic Beebo Brinker series), the Nancy Clue series by Mabel Maney, Virginia Woolf’s first completed novel, Melymbrosia, and an English-language novel set in North Korea, Jia by Hyejin Kim. Other Cleis Press authors include Lori Bryant-Woolridge, Cole Riley, Mitzi Szereto, Neil Plakcy, Radclyffe, James Lear, Richard Labonté. Cleis Press' erotic anthologies have included work from well known story writers Sacchi Green, Shanna Germain, Jeremy Edwards, Michelle Augello-Page, Charlotte Stein, ADR Forte, and Teresa Noelle Roberts.