Alta, ‘Shameless Hussy’ and Founder of Nation's First Feminist Press, Dies at 81

Alta Gerrey loved being in the thick of the conversation.

The award-winning poet, gallerist and people magnet — who published under a single moniker, Alta — kicked down the door to the predominately male preserve of publishing in the early 1970s. With a keen eye for talent, she ushered some of the most consequential women writers of that turbulent era onto the literary scene.

She died March 10 at the age of 81, at home in Oakland, after a long struggle with cancer.

Like many women who joined the feminist movement’s second wave in the late 1960s, Alta had been active in the civil rights movement. After realizing that she and her peers couldn’t get their work published, she launched the nation’s first feminist press in 1969, Shameless Hussy Press.

The ribald name signaled both Alta’s irreverent sensibility and her openness to writers who were sidelined and ignored by mainstream publishing.

“I had been reading Anaïs Nin’s diaries, and I knew that she and Henry Miller had made books on a letterpress,” she told Irene Reti in an interview for an essay about Shameless Hussy Press for the UC Santa Cruz University Library, which holds the Shameless Hussy archives.

Shameless Hussy was the first to publish Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, which went on to become a Tony-winning Broadway play. It introduced Mitsuye Yamada, whose Camp Notes and Other Poems were written during and after her experience in Minidoka, the internment camp in Hunt, Idaho. Shameless Hussy was also the first to publish work by Pat Parker, Susan Griffin, and Mary Mackey.

Mackey credits Alta with launching a career that now includes New York Times best-selling novels and eight volumes of poetry. Even with Fred Cody serving as her agent, Mackey couldn’t find a publisher for her first novel, 1972’s Immersion, a roman à clef about “a woman looking for her own personal and sexual liberation in the jungles of Costa Rica,” Mackey said.

“Alta looked at it and said, ‘I’m going to print it.’ She had the ability to look at a piece of work and not care who you knew, what class you were, or how you identified. She could see things in the work itself,” she said.

Susan Griffin was part of an Oakland women’s group with Alta and had faced multiple rejections from mainstream publishing houses when Shameless Hussy published her books The Sink: Six Short Stories and dear sky, a collection of poems. Part of the book deal involved working with Alta’s AB Dick 360 offset press, which she moved to San Lorenzo after receiving multiple death threats from people offended by work she had published.

“You would come out to San Lorenzo and help a couple of days in the printing process,” Griffin recalled. “She was a bit wacky, mostly in a great way, but sometimes not. Alta was just one of the most courageous people I knew. She was very very honest, unless she was on purpose not being honest. She would tell you about anything, say anything, or do anything she thought was right. That made her very effective regarding social change.”

By the mid 1970s, Alta had returned to Oakland, where she continued printing batches of groundbreaking poetry, essays and novels until 1989. The press’s biggest money maker was Calamity Jane’s Letters to her Daughter, a collection of uncertain provenance that got increased attention in 2016 when actor Ethan Hawke listed it as one of the best books he’d recently read. (Alta quickly printed up a batch of new copies.)

Running her own press gave Alta tremendous freedom, but it wasn’t a one-woman show.

“Everybody was part of the operation,” said her daughter Kia Simon, an independent video editor who sometimes works for KQED. “In elementary school we were making 10 cents an hour to fold books. It was a family business. My stepdad was pumping gas at a service station when they met, and he moved in with us. He was very focused on distribution, and the press actually paid for itself for 10 years.”

Born in 1942 in Reno, Nevada, Alta was 12 when her family moved to Berkeley so that her brother could attend the California School for the Blind. In the early 1960s, she dropped out of UC Berkeley to teach in the South. After the end of her first marriage to Danny Bosserman, she became caught up in the Bay Area’s literary ferment.

When her partnership with poet and noted Spanish-language translator John Oliver Simon ended in 1970, she founded a commune in Oakland for women seeking refuge from abusive relationships, which she wrote about enduring herself. Her second marriage to Daniel “Angel” Skarry in the early 1970s ended in divorce a decade later.

Alta’s 1980 book The Shameless Hussy: Selected Stories, Essays and Poetry won a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. Other volumes include 1990’s Traveling Tales: Flings I’ve Flung in Foreign Parts and 2015’s Another Moment: Living Well with a Dread Disease and Everything That Grows Can Also Shrink.

Always looking to stay in the mix culturally, she opened Alta Galleria in Berkeley’s Elmwood neighborhood in 2006, representing local artists and artists from China. She was forced to close the gallery due to the financial straits of the 2008 recession.

Misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Alta spent many years studying healing and diet while contending with increasingly limited mobility. She was a regular presence in her Temescal neighborhood, hanging out for hours with other writers, academics and artists at Pizzaiolo, where she always had a copy of the Financial Times and never seemed to pick up a check.

“Alta had a superpower for eating for free at restaurants,” Simon said. “There are a bunch of places where she wouldn’t get a bill, and Pizzaiolo was one of them.”

Alta is survived by her daughters Lorelei Bosserman of Oakland and Kia Simon of San Francisco, as well as her granddaughter Tesla Rose Moyer. A memorial will be held at noon on April 21 at Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland.

Shameless Hussy 

i am one of the true hussies;
i have no shame;
i was a housewife, and
stretched from the housiness of it (hus)
and the wifiness of (wif/hus-wif) to
a woman who cant bear wifedom (hussy) / i
grew beyond the house, like alice after eating
too many cookies. exactly what i did; i ate
too many cookies; lovers, poetry, moving my
body in a new way, an old way, the way women
like me have always moved, largely; with great
motions beyond our allotted sphere, with more
need than fear, and more grace than shame.[1]

—By Alta