just femme & dandy: a lit mag for queers plus

WHO WE ARE:

just femme & dandy is a biannual literary & arts magazine for and by queers+ on fashion. We fulfill a space in the literary world that didn't exist before, and we celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community, who have long since coded itself with their bodies when it has been dangerous to identify solely with words. Until recently, we could only find a handful of models within popular culture and the public imagination to inform our own aesthetic choices, and so the styles (and the art) we don and make operate as a patchwork quilt, collaged together with vintage and thrift store finds, our sister or mother's lipstick, our father's neckties.

We offer a space for the LGBTQIA+ community, but one that privileges underrepresented and marginalized writers and artists. Just as we transcend the lines between gender, sexuality, aesthetic, and style, just femme & dandy offers a home for works categorized by the interests of fashion and style rather than aesthetic genre, and we fully encourage and expect works that blur the lines between the written and the visual, the still and the moving image. just femme & dandy embraces all the layers of hybridity that push against the tensions that pressure us to conform. Nothing is off limits.

Here are our sections:

the glowup (skincare & cosmetics)

triple thread(s) (bespoke fashion and haute couture)

no scrubs (streetwear)

sew what (DIY/thrift/makeshift)

sole mates (shoes)

mane attraction (hair)

cancel & gretel (ethics & inclusion)

We also have columns: afrodisiac (Black hair), fat + furious (fatshion), not what it seams (costuming), and get your thread in the game (sports, leisure, movement).

Each issue has a theme, but we accept pieces outside of the theme. At a time when magazines are shuttering left and right, we remain and insist on being a paying market. We pay contributors, and we've also received generous support from Critical Minded and BIPOC Arts Network and Fund, which has also enabled us to pay editors and administrative costs. We publish writing, comics, illustration, video, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, listicle, short-or-long-form editorials, and any other creative work one can imagine that can be published on our website. We seek work from emerging and established writers, as well as artists on the periphery of the literary and arts publishing world. We also include interviews, tutorials, and product reviews. This past issue, we also published a photo spread of DapperQ at New York Fashion Week. We've published Dan Clay (aka Carrie Dragshaw), Aja Barber, Gabe Montesanti, The Illustrious Pearl (Wo Chan), Further ambitions include (when the world is not *still* quite so 2020) hosting drag performances, fashion shows, release parties that include presentations of the current issue's offerings, and exhibitions. We will soon sell on consignment clothing and accessories from independent LGBTQIA+ designers.

OUR TEAM:

Addie Tsai (any/all), founding editor in chief, is a queer nonbinary artist and writer of color who teaches creative writing at the College of William & Mary. They also teach in Goddard College's MFA Program in Interdisciplinary Arts and Regis University’s Mile High MFA Program in Creative Writing. Addie collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. They earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a Ph.D. in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. Addie is the author of Dear Twin and Unwieldy Creatures. She is the Fiction co-Editor and Editor of Features & Reviews at Anomaly, contributing writer at Spectrum South, and Founding Editor & Editor in Chief at just femme & dandy.

Sarah Sheppeck (they/fae/she), co-editor in chief, is a graduate of U.C. Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Rochester and her Master’s in Secondary Education and Curriculum from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Born and raised in upstate New York with stints in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and the woods of northern Maine, she is now back in her home state with her pit mix, Chloe.

Jen St. Jude (she/her), editor of sole attraction and get your thread in the game, is the fiction editor for Arcturus Magazine, a Daily Editor at the Chicago Review of Books, and has work in Gigantic Sequins, The Rumpus, and F(r)iction. She is the author of If Tomorrow Never Comes, a YA novel about two girls in love at the end of the world.

Kirin Khan (she/her), editor of triple thread(s), is a writer living in the Netherlands who calls Albuquerque, New Mexico her hometown, and Peshawar, Pakistan her homeland. She is an alumna of VONA/Voices, Las Dos Brujas, and the Tin House Writers Workshop. She was a 2017 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, 2017 SF Writers Grotto Fellow, 2018 AWP Writer to Writer Mentee, and a 2018 Steinbeck Fellow, and she received a 2019 fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Her essay “Tight” was nominated by Nat. Brut for a 2018 Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in The Margins, sPARKLE & bLINK, Your Impossible Voice, and 7x7.LA and elsewhere. She is working on her first novel.

Jo Davis-McElligatt (she/her), editor of no scrubs, received her PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Iowa in 2010. She is co-editor of Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy (Routledge 2018), Narrating History, Home, and Nation: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (U of Mississippi P, under contract), and BOOM! #*@&! Splat: Comics and Violence (U of Mississippi P, under contract). She is currently at work on her first monograph entitled Black and Immigrant: The New Black Diaspora in American Literature and Culture, a critical exploration of representations of immigrants of African descent to the U.S. from Afropolitans to Wakandan Americans. Her scholarly work appears in south: a scholarly journal, A History of the U.S. South (Cambridge UP, under contract), Small Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (LSU P 2017), and Critical Insights: The American Identity (Salem P 2014), among other places. Her work on comics has appeared in The Comics Journal, Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults (U of Mississippi P 2017), and The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking (U of Mississippi P 2010). She has published her own comic about living in Opelousas, Louisiana, in Little Village Magazine. 

Sky Cubacub (they/them), editor of cancel & gretel and accessibility coordinator, is a non-binary disabled Filipinx queer from Chicago, IL. Rebirth Garments is their clothing line for the full spectrum of gender, size and ability. They maintain the notion of Radical Visibility, a celebratory movement based on unapologetically flaunting our bodies through the use of bright colors, exuberant fabrics, and innovative designs. Sky was named 2018 Chicagoan of the Year by the Chicago Tribune and is a 2019/2020 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist and a Disability Futures Fellow. Rebirth Garments has been featured in Teen Vogue, Nylon, Playboy, the New York Times and many more! Find them on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter @rebirthgarments.

WHY WE NEED YOUR HELP:

We want to create this space in publishing for the LGBTQIA+ community, but we can't sustain just femme & dandy without your help. With your support, we plan to help pay administrative fees for our website, Vimeo account, and other services, and support our contributors, editors, designers, and coordinate events for the main public. We hope to surpass this goal so we can increase what we pay contributors, and even, hopefully, pay small honoraria to our editing staff as well in the gaps between the grants we receive.