INSIDER – When I was 13, my spleen was removed, leaving me immunocompromised. When I was 29, I was accepted to grad school, so I had to choose between my health and education. I’m entering my second year of grad school and hoping more people will wear masks.
TODAY.COM – I’ve never been comfortable with romantic date nights. So I came up with a solution: the anti-date.
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS PUBLAB – “Cleanse, tone, apply serum, moisturizer, rosehip oil—these were the five steps of my mother’s skincare routine. If you do this every day, you’ll look good as you age, she said.”
ROUGH CUT PRESS – Jeffrey Marsh is a bestselling author, viral TikTok and Instagram star, nonbinary activist, and LGBTQ keynote speaker. Jeffrey is the first nonbinary author to sign a book deal with any “Big 5” publisher worldwide, for Penguin Random House. Jeffrey’s #1 bestseller, How to Be You, topped Oprah’s Gratitude Meter and was named Excellent Book of the Year by TED-Ed. Jeffrey’s second book, Take Your Own Advice, was a #1 Amazon Best Seller, outselling all Self-Esteem books upon its release. Jeffrey has spoken at the U.N. and for global brands like Target and BNP, and has reported on LGBTQ topics for Good Morning America, The New York Times, Variety, TIME, and the BBC. In addition, Jeffrey was an LGBTQ consultant for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and has consulted for New York University, GLAAD, MTV, Condé Nast’s Them, and Teen Vogue.
CNN – “Part of what fueled my addiction was a deep sense of isolation rooted in an estrangement from my nuclear family – my queerness directly informed this estrangement. I cannot meaningfully discuss this reality with people who may have never faced rejection based on their intrinsic identity. It is like trying to explain the sensation of water to someone who has never gone swimming: You have to feel it to know it.”
HUFFPOST PERSONAL – “For as long as I could remember, people told me I would look and feel better if I lost weight. … By the time I was 10, I ritually put myself on weird diets.”
HUFFPOST PERSONAL – “We had sex in three different bathrooms the day we got married in San Francisco City Hall, and I drank so much tequila, the bars turned to fluorescent red pulp.”
ROUGH CUT PRESS – Alok Vaid-Menon (they/them/theirs) is an internationally acclaimed writer, performer, and public speaker. As a mixed-media artist their work explores themes of trauma, belonging, and the human condition. They are the author of Femme in Public (2017), Beyond the Gender Binary (2020), and Your Wound/My Garden (2021). They are the creator of #DeGenderFashion: a movement to degender fashion and beauty industries and have been honored as one of HuffPo’s Culture Shifters, NBC’s Pride 50, and Business Insider’s Doers. Over the past decade they have presented at more than 600 venues in 40 countries.
ROUGH CUT PRESS – Andrea Gibson (they/them/theirs) is a queer author of five full-length collections of poetry, including Lord of the Butterflies (Button Poetry 2018) which sold over 20,000 copies worldwide. Winner of The Independent Publishers Award in 2019, Andrea is also a three-time Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist. In 2017, Penguin Books published Take Me With You, an illustrated collection of Gibson’s most beloved quotes, and in 2019, Chronicle Books published their first non-fiction endeavor, How Poetry Can Change Your Heart. The winner of the first Women’s World Poetry Slam, Gibson has gone on to be featured on BBC, Air America, CSpan, and regularly sells out large capacity venues all over the world. Gibson has also released seven full-length albums of spoken word. Their most recent book, You Better Be Lightning, is now available.
ROUGH CUT PRESS – Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet) and the memoir The Natural Mother of the Child (Counterpoint). His work has appeared in Granta, Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in Best of the Net 2018 and Wigleaf Top 50. Krys has won contests at Redivider and Pigeon Pages and his work has been supported by the Sustainable Arts Foundation. He received his BA from Swarthmore College, his M.Ed in Special Education from Arcadia University, and his MFA in Creative Writing at Northern Michigan University. Krys lives in Philadelphia with his partner and their three young children.