By Nicole Mitchell
“The next time someone asks you why LGBT Pride marches exist or why Gay Pride Month is June tell them, ‘A bisexual woman named Brenda Howard thought it should be.’” — Brenda Howard
While it’s true that the first pride was a riot, many credit bisexual and LGBTQIA+ Activist Brenda Howard for continuing the fight and making June officially known as Pride Month—therefore awarding her the name of “Mother of Pride.”
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By Sophie Oswald
Steffanie Moyers has always loved writing, but it took a while before she seriously pursued it as a career. Before becoming a freelance writer, she worked for a range of companies, like Netflix and NBC. Today she not only writes articles and blog posts, but she is hired to write and edit novels too.
Steffanie has written, edited, and self-published four novels of her own and doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. We chatted about the past, present, and future of her writing career, with a special focus on her newest serial killer thriller that came out in April.
The story follows our serial killer protagonist, Knox. Knox dances at the most exclusive strip club in all of Vegas, The Strip. Hidden on the 69th floor of The Cosmopolitan, the club can only be accessed with the right connections and a lot of money. It serves as the perfect place for her to hide in plain sight. The perfect place for her to occasionally rob or kill the scum patrons of the club…until she makes one too many mistakes and catches the attention of the LVMPD. While out in the casinos one night, she meets an attractive man and a whirlwind romance ensues. She doesn’t know he’s the FBI agent hunting her. He doesn’t know she’s the killer he’s looking for. Are red flags colored from blood, lust, or both? Will they have their answers before it’s too late?
As they say, WHAT HAPPENS IN…well, you know the rest.
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By Nicole Mitchell
Caley Rose is a female empowerment pop singer of four years—and she’s just getting started. So far, her music has been in commercials, she’s been streaming her music creation, her single “GAME OVER” is on the Billboard charts, and, coming up soon, Rose will be performing at an event this Saturday in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
While Rose has been booked and busy regarding her music career recently, it wasn’t always that way. “I was always a singer,” she said. “But I got lost along the way and took some detours.” Her original end goal was to join Broadway as a performer. “However, if I was honest with myself, I really just wanted to do pop music.”
It took Rose a while into her music career to make the switch to pop. “I was working with different producers, and I wasn’t a songwriter,” she said. At the time, Rose followed the lead of what her songwriters wanted her music to sound like. “It wasn’t until four years ago that I started songwriting,” she explained. “Once I realized myself as a writer, I saw myself as a singer.”
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By Sophie Oswald
Illustrations by Matthew Vargas
“Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t,” Rebecca Solnit remarked in her essay Men Explain Things to Me. While Solnit didn’t specifically use the word “mansplain” in her popular essay, she was one of the first to discuss this phenomenon. Conversations surrounding her essay shortly resulted in the term appearing in a comment section online.
Most women, maybe even all women, have been there. Men have been explaining things in patronizing ways for centuries.
Generally, mansplaining involves a conversation between a man and a woman, but sometimes it can happen between two men or with a man and a non-binary person.
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By Nicole Mitchell
Jada Hester is a photographer and small business co-owner of Film and Jpegs Studio located in Olathe, Kansas. Starting early on in photography, she has had plenty of time to create a style of art that is recognizable as hers—colorful, fun, and human-centered
Hester first got into photography when she was a child, following in her dad’s footsteps. “He had a cool camera when I was kid that I would play with,” she said. But it wasn’t until high school that she really considered photography as a potential career path. After graduating high school, she went to a local community college and took her first photography class. “It was fun to be around other photographers, but the class wasn’t 100% needed,” Hester said. “I thought, ‘Why didn’t I just teach myself all of this?’”
During the beginning of the pandemic, Hester and her boyfriend talked about creating a studio out of a shed in the backyard of her boyfriend’s parents’ house. With this, the two started a small business together (her boyfriend’s idea), offering Hester’s photography as a side job. “He’s more on the business side, and I’m on the art side,” she said. “Working together has been tough—as it would be in any relationship where they work together—but I’m really proud of it.” She shares that getting the shed started and creating their business together is what she’s most proud of in regards to her art.
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Catcall 