Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center was founded in 1974 in San Francisco. It had a storefront in the Mission District during the 1970s and 1980s. By the mid-1990s, it was housed at the New College of California on Valencia and in the year 2000 it relocated to the San Francisco campus of the California College of the Arts.
Small Press Traffic has served many communities of writers and readers with a long-running focus on New Narrative fiction and Language Poetry as well as a devotion to queer literature.
Past directors include Robert Glück, Dodie Bellamy, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Elizabeth Treadwell, and Dana Teen Lomax. Important board members have included Kevin Killian, Edith Jenkins, John Norton, Mary Margaret Sloan, Stan Hutton, Brent Cunningham, and Stephanie Young. The current director is Samantha Giles.