About

Autumn de León (she/they) is a master's student at the University of Victoria. Her research focuses on book history, print culture, and trans studies. She completed her BA in English at UC Berkeley, where her honors thesis explored narration's role in shaping reception and feminist voice in Latin American texts.

At UVic, she is researching how manual labor within fine press functions as a site of authority, with the necessary visible labor of letterpress printmaking signifies traditional methodologies of production, thus mediating their reception. She is especially interested in how this can be applied to gender-expansive small press projects that co-opt the aesthetics of fine press to infiltrate aesthetically conservative contexts.

Autumn's academic work is interwoven with her work as an artist-printer. She is the co-founder of Lavender Corazón Press, a small press producing artists' books that engage with queer and Latine thought. Her 2026 artists' book, An Archive, presents a series of questions asked by medical gatekeepers as preconditions for receiving gender-affirming care, drawn from original anonymous interviews. Printed letterpress on archival papers in a nonarchival enclosure, the book is held by Stanford University's Bowes Arts and Architecture Library, the Bancroft Library, the UCLA Arts Library, and the CODEX Foundation's artists' book library.

Through both her research and presswork, Autumn is interested in how knowledge is produced and archived, and how those processes inevitably alter the messages they seek to disseminate.