Welcome to the City Lights Foundation!
 
For over half a century, City Lights Books has demonstrated a commitment to preserving and promoting the diversity of voices and ideas that are represented in quality books. As the increasingly concentrated mass media and new information technologies change the way people live, work, and think, we believe that nurturing the ability to think critically, to discern truth, and to communicate knowledge is essential to a democratic society.

With this in mind, we have formed the non-profit City Lights Foundation with the goal of advancing deep literacy, which is not only the ability to read and write but fluency in the knowledge and skills that enable us to consciously shape our lives and the life of our community.

 

 

Featured books from the City Lights Foundation

Product image
Prison/Culture
Sharon E. Bliss, Kevin B. Chen, Steve Dickison, Mark Dean Johnson, Rebeka Rodriguez
Nearly fifty artists, poets, and activists examine the contemporary prison system through heartrending art and community
Product image
Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds
The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose
Chad Sweeney
Raw, inspired testimony and work from the teachers of the National WritersCorps
Product image
Criminal of Poverty
Growing Up Homeless in America
Lisa Gray-Garcia, aka Tiny
A daughter’s struggle to keep her family alive, through poverty, homelessness and incarceration.
Product image
The Other Side of the Postcard
devorah major
In conjunction with the San Francisco Public Library, poet laureate devorah major made a public appeal for poems that explored the realities of people's lives in a city as tough and tragic as it is beautiful and exhilarating. This anthology collects...
Product image
The Political Edge
Chris Carlsson
In the wake of the astonishing popular mobilization on behalf of an underdog campaign to elect Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez mayor of San Francisco, The Political Edge analyzes emergent political energies, where they came from and where they're...
Product image
San Francisco's Telegraph Hill
Revised and Updated Edition
David F. Myrick
The City Lights Foundation has collaborated with the Telegraph Hill Dwellers Association to update and reprint David Myrick's classic Telegraph Hill, a beautiful, lavishly illustrated book that is an invaluable community resource documenting the story...