Issue #13 is out in the world!
Issue #13 with cover artwork by Jennifer Frederick
This year we feature nonbinary and transgender artists and writers with works by Gabriel Noel, Gene Case, Sampson Spadafore, Hillary Werth, and Isaac Stephens. Our general section includes prose, poetry, and art by Tom C. Hunley, Alison Alstrom, Eric Diekhans, Matina Vassou, and GJ Gillespie. The special section is guest edited by Lydia Conklin.
Our editor-in-chief this year, Bailey Vandiver, shares some thoughts…
“Just as we are shaped by what we don’t read. For too long, literary canon and bestseller lists have excluded works by marginalized authors. Thankfully, this historic wrong has begun to be corrected in recent years, but we must still improve. Personally, my own booklists and bookshelves were too monolithic for too long, and who I was and what I understood was impacted by what I did and didn’t read. Not until college did I read books like Corregidora by Gayl Jones, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, and A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines, masterpieces that both entertain and educate. I’m still on a personal journey to diversify what and who I read.
This mission also drives the special section of Jelly Bucket, this year dedicated to Nonbinary and Trans Voices. Guest editor Lydia Conklin writes of their search for written works that reflected their experience; alumni editor Edy Thomas writes of the “struggle of being a trans writer versus being a writer who happens to be trans.” This special section exists for nonbinary and trans writers and readers, for a place to exist in which what they read is what they are. But it’s also for the readers who are unfamiliar with that experience but can become more familiar…”
Read, ponder, enjoy!
