Arte Público Press, the oldest and most accomplished publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by U.S. Hispanic authors, and its imprint, Piñata Books, has become the country’s leading showcase for Hispanic literary creativity, arts and culture. In the early 1970s, it became obvious to Nicolás Kanellos, Ph.D., founder and director of Arte Público Press and the Brown Foundation Chair of Sp
anish at the University of Houston, that Hispanic writers were not being published by the mainstream presses. To provide an outlet for the creative efforts of Latino writers, Kanellos founded the Revista Chicana-Riqueña, in Gary, Indiana in 1972. This quarterly magazine for Latino literature, art and thought eventually evolved into The Americas Review. The magazine won praise and recognition nationwide, including the 1986 and 1987 Citations of Achievement from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. Building on the literary magazine's success, Kanellos founded Arte Público Press in 1979 to further the endeavor of providing a national forum for Hispanic literature. The following year, Kanellos was offered a position at the University of Houston, and he was invited to bring the press with him. As part of the ever-expanding efforts to bring Hispanic literature to mainstream audiences, Arte Público Press launched the Recovering the U.S. The Recovery project represents the first nationally coordinated attempt to recover, index and publish lost Latino writings that date from the American colonial period through 1960. The notion of an imprint dedicated to the publication of literature for children and young adults was planted by an urgent public demand for books that accurately portray U.S. In 1994, a grant from the Mellon Foundation allowed Arte Público Press to transform the dream into a reality. With its bilingual books for children and its entertaining novels for young adults, Piñata Books has made giant strides toward filling the void in the literary market created by an increased awareness of diverse cultures. Arte Público Press has expanded into producing much-needed documentation of the Hispanic Civil Rights Movement through the creation of the Hispanic Civil Rights Series. The series seeks to address the continuing, appalling lack of information accessible to students and the general public. Highlighted in the series are the topics of women’s activism, immigration reform, educational equity, the participation of citizens in a democratic society, civic culture and racial/cultural relations. With thirty titles published each year, Arte Público Press is David to New York publishing industry Goliaths. However, because of its cultural sensitivity to its writers and the experiences they write about, along with a vision for the role of Hispanic literature in the United States, Arte Público Press has demonstrated that size (or lack of it) is not proportionately related to success in the commercial book market.
