CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO A CELESTE WEST “FESTSCHRIFT” BOOK PROJECT
Co-editors Toni Samek and KR Roberto are seeking articles, stories,
poems, photographs, letters, thought pieces and other individual and
collective memories of Celeste West, lesbian, feminist librarian,
publisher, and activist, for a festschrift to be published by Library
Juice Press in 2009. Celeste passed away in San Francisco on January
3, 2008 at the age of 65. She was a pioneering progressive librarian
and one of the founders of the Bay Area Reference Center (BARC),
Booklegger Press, Synergy [Magazine], and Booklegger Magazine. She was
also co-editor of the now classic title Revolting Librarians. From
1989 until 2006, Celeste worked as the library director at the San
Francisco Zen Center. She was a radical library worker whose practice
challenged established library traditions by encouraging librarians to
speak up about the need for systematic change. West initiated
questions and challenged assumptions (such as library neutrality) that
continue to be central issues examined in critical librarianship
today. However, while Celeste released a lot of work to the world as
author and editor, not much was ever shared about her as subject.
Thus, we are seeking your contributions to a Celeste West festschrift
book project.
For an historical snapshot of some of Celeste�s key contributions via
Booklegger Press, please see: Toni Samek. 2006. “Unbossed and
Unbought: Booklegger Press the First Women-Owned American Library
Publisher” in Women In Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American
Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Edited by James P.
Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand. Foreword by Elizabeth Long. Madison, WI:
The University of Wisconsin Press in collaboration with the Center for
the History of Print Culture in Modern America at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. Pages 126-155. Available in print and as an online
book.
For a more contemporary introduction to Celeste�s way of thinking,
see: Revolting Librarians Redux: Radical Librarians Speak Out by K.R.
Roberto and Jessamyn West.
Please direct your ideas and queries to the FESTSCHRIFT Editorial
Assistant and Project Manager Moyra Lang (moyra @ ualberta.ca). The
final deadline for all contributions is December 10, 2008.
If you have not encountered the name Celeste West until now, please
see here: http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?p=361 and here:
http://newpagesblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/in-memoriam-celeste-west.html
THANK YOU! Toni Samek, KR Roberto, and Moyra Lang.