Chicago-area writer, historian, activist and publisher Marie J. Kuda founded Womanpress and created the Lesbian Writers Conferences held in Chicago from 1974 to 1978. As a literary mentor and an active voice in the Chicago writing scene, Kuda compiled a lifelong personal collection whose holdings included Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, published as a pamphlet by Out & Out Books, and a first printing of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Riot. In 2012, the Poetry Center was honored to receive selected books, chapbooks, and ephemera from Kuda’s collection, on display for the first time in this exhibit of lesbian and feminist works.