Getting to Know AK: Suzanne
OK, so you’re probably thinking to yourself, “I read the AK Press blog religiously, but I’m sure I haven’t seen profiles for all of the collective members yet! My life feels empty and meaningless since there are still three AK collective members I haven’t virtually met yet!” Well, I can’t do much about the other slackers over here, but here I am—finally ready to do my part.
So here’s the quick background: I’m 27 years old. I have lived kind of all over the place (including stints in Wisconsin, upstate New York, the wonderful-but-freezing Twin Cities, and even Dakar), but I spent nearly half of my life living in a few different parts of West Virginia. It’s a beautiful landscape to be sure, but by some counts the poorest state in the U.S., and certainly the most racist place I’ve ever been. I may not have had a word for it at the time, but I like to think that I have been some sort of anarchist ever since I realized there how many people’s different experiences of oppression were so tied up in capitalism and the State. Later, of course, I realized that there were a whole tradition of people who had also realized this, which was a pretty inspiring discovery.
I have worked with books pretty much ever since I started working—partly because I appreciate them as objects, but also because they’re such an essential means of spreading ideas. My first paid gig as a teenager was in a public library (I was in charge of making sure the Harlequin novels were shelved in the correct order). A college education and a few food service jobs later, I ended up working in some amazing independent bookstores: the late, great Ruminator Books in St. Paul (formerly Hungry Mind), and Amazon Bookstore Cooperative in Minneapolis (a feminist spot that’s been around since 1970 and was recently reincarnated as True Colors). At the same time, I was lucky enough to be taken under the wings of the fine folks at Coffee House Press in Minneapolis, first as a publishing intern and then as a letterpress apprentice. I also stuck around and worked on Ruminator magazine (a feisty little book review rag) until it was shut down a year after the bookstore closed.
I became an AK collective member when I moved to the Bay Area in 2005. I applied for a job here because it seemed like the perfect way to combine my particular brand of workaholism (is that a word?) with my anarchist politics, and luckily the collective agreed… now I really can’t imagine doing anything else. I started out doing shipping & receiving, then moved into ordering, and about half a year ago landed in my current role doing distro sales. I get to spend my time building relationships with other publishers, infoshops, tablers, and independent bookstores; helping choose and work on the titles we publish and distribute; traveling all over North America to represent AK at bookfairs and conferences; and struggling (yes, I mean struggling, in the most constructive sense of the term!) to collectively manage a project that has been putting out amazing anarchist and radical books for 20 years. Seriously, that is pretty cool.
When I’m not doing something involving reading, publishing, or selling anarchist books, you can often find me doing one of the following: printing (I’m a member of the San Francisco Print Collective), designing (last year I joined Critical Resistance’s Abolitionist newspaper collective as the designer, and have been known to do a book or record cover here and there), pumping iron (to get ready for the revolution?), watching nerdy films, listening to geeky music, or drinking delicious bourbons.
You’re probably tired of hearing about me by now, so I will leave you with some big news: this fall, I will be relocating to join Kate at AK Baltimore. I am sorry to leave the Bay, but really excited to be part of developing a new AK office/warehouse and thinking of ways that AK can have more of a presence on the east coast and be a better resource for all the folks who are doing so much great work out there. So, if you’re on the east coast… I’m probably coming soon to a bookstore, tabling event, or whiskey bar near you, and I’d be thrilled to hear your ideas.