Community Spotlight: Printing & Publishing Cooperative Radix Media

Caption: Radix Media worker-owner Sarah Lopez

By Shreema Mehta

Meet a fellow member of the cooperative ecosystem in New York City! Radix Media is a worker-owned printer and publisher based in Prospect Heights. (Follow them on Instagram to check out their amazing work). The 10-year old co-op was started in Portland, Oregon by Lance Arroyo, who “fell in love with printmaking” after apprenticing at a local print shop, said worker-owner Sarah Lopez. The cooperative planted roots in Brooklyn in 2013, after Lance moved back to the city and merged his outfit with a print shop borne from the Occupy Wall Street movement, OccuCopy.

Radix prints all kinds of materials -- signs, posters, brochures and more -- for a wide range of clients, including other cooperatives, nonprofit organizations and political campaigns. In 2018, the company expanded to independent publishing with a mission to publish stories “that aren’t typically told in the publishing world,” Sarah said, and actively seeks out new writers from underrepresented communities. In addition to printing, Radix also designs the books’ covers and pages. Its first title, Aftermath: Explorations in Loss & Grief, is an anthology of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and comics from 33 contributors around the world. Other works include Futures: A Science Fiction Series, a series of chapbooks exploring ideas such as constant surveillance and invisible disabilities.

In pursuit of its mission to elevate underrepresented voices, Radix runs its Own Voices Chapbook Prize, to highlight and publish works of poetry from debut poets of color. The “Own Voices'' title was inspired by the #OwnVoices hashtag coined by author Corinne Duyvis, to “recommend kidlit about diverse characters written by authors from that same diverse group.” By seeking out underrepresented voices, adding design and printing their works, Radix elevates ideas that might otherwise be ignored. This year, Radix published the works of its first 2020 prize recipient, poet JinJin Xu, titled There is Still Singing in the Afterlife. Next year, Radix will print the poetry chapbook of its second prize winner, Ghinwa Jawhari.

With the demands of printing, publishing and worker-ownership, life is busy for the four-member Radix team. But Sarah mentioned that Radix is thriving in part due its cooperative structure. Its culture of cooperation has enabled it to pivot during the pandemic. Constant communication and flexibility allowed the team members to change their work schedules to allow for both social distancing and new pandemic-related demands (such as childcare). Radix also benefits from a cooperative network in New York that it can turn to for support, such as the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives (NYC NOWC) NYCNOW and the Cooperative Economics  Alliance of NYC (CEANYC -- of which Greene Hill is also a member).

You can support Radix by purchasing an innovative work from an emerging writer here!