An essential aspect of The Offing's mission is a commitment "to seek out and support work by and about those often marginalized in the literary conversation." In the months leading up to and in the week since our launch, several people -- men, white men, white straight cis-gendered men in positions of power, whose work we deeply respect and admire -- have suggested that our mission, while well intended, is redundant. These voices, they assert, are not marginalized, but centered, celebrated.

They point to James Hannaham, an African-American writer whose novel Delicious Foods, published by Little, Brown, has met with universal praise. They point to Juan Felipe Herrera's status as the poet laureate of California, to Khaled Metta's MacArthur grant, to Eileen Myles's Guggenheim fellowship, to the popularity of fiction by such writers as Jhumpa Lahiri and Arundhati Roy, Naomi Shihab Nye and Mohsin Hamid.

Yes, these writers are celebrated -- as they should be. But arguing that the acclaim received by a relatively small number of writers means that the work is done is, we think, not unlike claiming that a black man in the White House means there is no longer racism in America.

We point to VIDA's gender counts, which are often met with hostility and defensiveness, as Katherine Angel discussed recently in the Los Angeles Review of Books. We point to Claudia Rankine, whose forthcoming anthology The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, grew out of a public exchange about racism with a prominent, and unreceptive, white male colleague. And we point to the recent "poetry" reading, by Kenneth Goldsmith, of St. Louis County's autopsy report on Michael Brown -- about which poet, ally, and Offing advisory-board member Amy King has written with tremendous power on the VIDA blog.

The work is just beginning.