Small Press Traffic was founded in 1974 in a gay-owned bookstore in San Francisco’s Castro District, and has remained artist run and community centered ever since. Our first program offerings in the 1970s included Robert Glück’s gay men’s fiction workshop and Gloria Anzaldúa’s feminist, Lesbian, and Chicana workshop, El Mundo Zurdo. SPT remains connected to these communities today as it broadens its reach through collaborations with queer and trans, Black, and disability-focused organizations.

Over our fifty-year history, we have offered poetry readings, performances, workshops, talks, conferences, residency and retreat opportunities, online and print publications, a decade of Poets Theater Festivals, and an annual Curatorial Fellowship. Our programming priorities are:

COLLABORATION: We partner with institutions, groups, and individuals on over 50% of our public programs.
REPRESENTATION: All of our programs, publications, and projects are led by and/or feature underrepresented artists.

In addition to public programs, SPT produces online and print publications. From 2020-2022, we published Traffic Report, an online magazine that featured poetry, conversations, reviews, interviews, translations, and artwork primarily by local poets and artists. In 2021, we produced High Dawn Collected 2020-21, a print publication of selections from our online reading series in the first year of the pandemic. In fall 2022, we launched The Back Room, our flagship online publishing platform that commissions critical and creative responses to contemporary issues to audiences that are regional, national, and international.

In August 2024, SPT received a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation to carry out an extensive archive and preservation project. With 3,000 digital and physical holdings, our collection will be made accessible to the public in late 2024. We are currently engaging in an oral history project to capture voices that represent Small Press Traffic and Bay Area poetry, art, and print cultures over the past half century.