About Beacon Broadside

Beacon Broadside, a project of Beacon Press, is an online venue for essays, news items, and dispatches from Beacon authors, advisors or friends of the house, staff and others. The blog is also a forum for discussion, with all posts open for comments by readers.

The mission of Beacon Press is to affirm and promote these principles: the inherent worth and dignity of every person; justice, equity and compassion in human relations; acceptance of one another; a free and responsible search for truth and meaning; the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process in society; the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all; respect for the interdependent web of all existence; and the importance of literature and the arts in democratic life. To these ends, Beacon has published countless acclaimed and ground-breaking works by authors including James Baldwin, Herbert Marcuse, Jean Baker Miller, Mary Daly, Marian Wright Edelman, Cornel West, Michael Patrick MacDonald, Rashid Khalidi, and Mary Oliver, among many others. You can read more about the history of Beacon Press here.

The mission of Beacon Broadside is to extend this tradition of thought-provoking, fearless commentary beyond the realm of traditional publishing and to reach out to a new community of socially conscious readers. We encourage readers to comment on and link to our posts to become part of our ongoing conversation with some of the best writers of our time.

Beacon Broadside was made possible by a generous grant from The Fund for UU Social Responsibility of the UU Funding Program.

Jessica Bennett is the blog editor of Beacon Broadside. Jessica's writing has appeared in Babble.com, Ruminator Review, and Rain Taxi Review of Books, among others, and she was formerly assistant editor for Rain Taxi.

Praise for Beacon Broadside:

Galleycat: "Beacon Broadside... is a site which uses the imprint's passion for social justice as a starting point for its own engagement with readers...it's more than just an advertisement; it's an entirely new conversation."

LeanLeft.com: "What there isn’t is a lot of hard sell, buy me now, here’s a contest desperation masquerading as marketing. They have their authors write about subjects that interest them and let their writing do the marketing. It’s a very good idea and should be a template for how publishers do blogs."