The Rumpus magazine needs a REDESIGN

UPDATE: Thank you to the 200+ supporters who helped us reach our initial goal of $10,000 to cover the costs of The Rumpus’s redesign! All additional funds raised by June 14 will go toward increasing pay to the magazine’s contributors in the coming year. It’s important to us to have both a functional, accessible website AND to work toward better compensation for the writers & artists who make The Rumpus worth reading!

The Rumpus needs YOUR HELP. This fundraiser will make it possible for us to redesign our website, which has been running on the same WordPress template since the site launched 14 years ago, which makes it like 1,400 in Internet years. Do you remember the Internet in 2009? Frankly, the site is wildly outdated, not mobile friendly, nearly impossible to search, and glitchy with formatting poetry and comics especially. We get a large amount of traffic (~50K unique viewers/month, over a million/year), but behind the scenes, it's mostly generic duct tape back there. It’s frustrating to our volunteer team of editors and the 400+ authors we publish every year. An update is long overdue, but we can't do it without your support.

The total cost of the redesign is $20K, but we were recently able to apply for and won our first grant: a Capacity Building award from CLMP that covers half the redesign costs–but only half. We need your help to raise the rest. We already have a trusted designer on board and a contract we can sign once the funds are raised. Please help us meet our goal by June 14, so we can relaunch this fall!

Reaching this fundraising goal will allow us to:

About The Rumpus: Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest-running online literary magazines around. We’ve been independent since the start, which means we're not connected with any academic institution or part of a larger publishing company and the vast majority of the magazine’s funding comes from reader support. Writers who we published early in their careers – including Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Samantha Irby, and Ada Limón – helped establish the site as a place to find great risk-taking writing. Currently, over 90% of the contributors we publish come through our no-fee open reading periods, which means they were not solicited and we're often one of their first major bylines.

Our magazine is primarily volunteer-run and focuses on publishing emerging and historically underrepresented voices. In recent years, we’ve paid special attention to the latter demographic with the addition of our Rumpus Original Poetry section as well as columns dedicated to marginalized writers such as ENOUGH (devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, and fiction by women, trans, and nonbinary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence), Voices on Addiction (devoted to personal narratives of addiction), and We Are More (for Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) and SWANA diaspora writers). We are committed to supporting the literary community at large, and also regularly publish interviews with authors and book reviews of both poetry and prose titles.

In early 2022, Alyson Sinclair became the Publisher/Owner of The Rumpus. The previous Publisher/Owner, Marisa Siegel, acquired the magazine in 2017, and after 5 years of relentlessly hard volunteer work to stabilize its reputation and finances, she had to step away to take a full-time paying position. Alyson's 2nd job (the one that pays) is as a freelance literary publicist. There's no secret money or big investors.

Everyone at the magazine feels charged with both honoring the magazine’s deep archives AND making sure the space continues to be viable for new literary voices. This isn't possible without the magazine's incredible volunteer editors and readers, our contributors, and reader support.

ALL funds raised will directly support the magazine’s website redesign. If we somehow surpass our goal, we’ll put any extra towards commissioning new art for our columns and other wishlist improvements that will help bring additional attention to the writers we publish!

We’re asking our readers and the literary community to show our volunteer staff and the thousands of writers the magazine has published that you value the work The Rumpus does.

You can find our current site here. We're also on Twitter and Instagram @the_rumpus. Please tag us if you GIVE! We'd love to share why you're supporting us.

Gifts at any level are appreciated and sharing this campaign with your fellow readers is a bonus. Please support us if you can!