Meet FP's new Senior Editor, Jeanne Thornton

We’re excited to welcome Jeanne Thornton to the Feminist Press team as Senior Editor. To get to know more about Jeanne and her editorial vision, we asked her to share more about her history with publishing, her hopes for the job, and what types of books she’s looking to acquire.

How did you come to work with Feminist Press?

I started in the industry as an intern at Seven Stories Press in 2008, and since leaving there in 2011, I’ve been mostly pursuing a passion for publishing by other means, most notably Instar Books, the small press my dear friend Miracle Jones and I cofounded (and still run, in the hours we have). I legitimately didn’t think I would be working in-house in trade publishing again. 

But I have traveled in parallel with Feminist Press over the years—I’ve known folks who worked here, blurbed books, and recently contributed an essay on Joanna Russ, for one. As part of my independent publishing work, I’ve also gotten to know Feminist Press executive director Margot Atwell, starting during her time at Kickstarter, and have been a huge fan of the work she’s done there and at FP in thinking about how to publish both ethically and sustainably. We have talked about publishing and our hopes for it over the years, and when the opportunity came to work with her to try to do some of those things at Feminist Press, I was excited to take it.

All of the best things I’ve done have at root been collaborations, very especially the aforementioned Instar Books. I’m just getting to know many of the current staff at Feminist Press, but they have all immediately struck me as brilliant, operating with grace in what is a very fast-paced industry, and with clear ideas on how to do many of the things that conventional wisdom does not hold possible for independent presses! I’m so stoked to get to collaborate with these people and contribute what I can to this project.

You are a trans woman editor in a field that does not have a lot of trans women editors. How do you feel about this?

Humbled at being invited to take part and grateful that me having this job is something thinkable. In the history of feminism, that has not always been the case. Since the news of me taking this role appeared in Publishers Weekly, I’ve received so many nice messages and notes from people: I very much want to live up to the belief in me they’ve shown.

I also want to take the responsibility of this position seriously. Real talk: it can be very difficult for editors to relate to writing founded on experiences that they, by virtue of their lives, have not had. There can be a vast barrier, and either your writing must work much, much harder than others’ writing to cross that barrier, or an editor must try to be accessible to the experiences you’re narrating. I never want to forget the experience of being on the other side of that equation, in those ways that I have been, and I want to use it to inform the kind of editor I want to be: one who tries to be ever more responsive to resonance.

What kinds of books are you looking to acquire for Feminist Press?

“My personal fiction loves are Borges-y metafiction, Clarice Lispector’s inward visions, Mary Gaitskill’s sharp narratives of encounter, and uncategorizable visionary epics like Gayl Jones’s Palmares”

First and foremost, I want to continue some of the incredible work the outgoing editorial lead at Feminist Press, the brilliant Lauren Hook, did in publishing formally daring work in translation and sharp, felt contemporary writing by women and queer people. My personal fiction loves are Borges-y metafiction, Clarice Lispector’s inward visions, Mary Gaitskill’s sharp narratives of encounter, and uncategorizable visionary epics like Gayl Jones’s Palmares—I would love to get to edit a magical work like that! I’m specifically curious about trans fiction, especially from people and in modes we haven’t previously gotten to see. I would love to publish writing about encounters between earlier waves of feminism and contemporary queer-inclusive feminisms, especially writing that explores the rough places around those encounters. I’d love to edit books around DIY trans health care efforts. My previous day job in ed-tech—as well as growing up in Texas public schools—makes me really want to see an oral history of teachers resisting, at the classroom level, the imperative to censor Black history, radical history, and the existence of queer lives. I would love to see good biographies and hybrid biographies about feminist writers, especially ones working within recent decades, as well as biographies of scenes. I would love to read about witches—fiction or not.

If you have written any of these books, or would like to, please get in touch; let’s make plans.

What other things do you want to do while at Feminist Press?

Lately I’ve been thinking about Kristin A. Hogan’s history of feminist bookstores and antiracism, which talks about some of the fundamental organizing work women readers did in the 1970s to build a real feminist literary movement. Women founded bookstores, worked to protect them physically, developed reading lists and mailing lists to connect women readers, petitioned large publishers to bring classic feminist works back into print, and actively worked against the algal blooms of racism within those movements. Institutions grew out of that organizing work, one of which is, of course, Feminist Press. And it’s very humbling to be working to help maintain it! But I also want to remember that institutions, once they solidify, can lose touch with that fluid energy that drew them into being. 

Some of the biggest influences on my own writing have been transgender open mics and friends’ manuscripts traded by email. It’s through these kinds of contacts that literatures form. I think it’s important, as an editor, to remember that—the material we get sent through agencies is a very, very small piece of the conversation happening everywhere—and to question whether it’s possible to get closer to the source of those currents, to make walls between publishers and readers more porous, to listen better. One of the specific FP efforts I’m really excited about that feels related to this is the Patchwork literary salon and the conversations it creates: yes please! More like this.

Jeanne Thornton started working in publishing at Seven Stories Press in 2008, and she has worked with Berghahn Books, Stacked Deck Press, Greenleaf Book Group, and as the copublisher of Instar Books. She is the author of Summer Fun (winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction), as well as The Black Emerald, The Dream of Doctor Bantam, and the forthcoming A/S/L, and is the coeditor of We’re Still Here: An All-Trans Comics Anthology. Her writing has appeared in n+1, WIRED, Harper’s Bazaar, Evergreen Review, Epiphany, and other places. She maintains a website at jeannethornton.com.  jeanne[at]feministpress[dot]org.