Wanted: New Captain & Crew

by Julia Rios

We will be turning Mermaids Monthly over to a new team in 2022!

We want this team to be BIPOC-led and have a BIPOC editor.

We are happy for the editorial team to be based anywhere in the world, but at least one member of the team will need to be US-based and able and willing to take on the legal business owner/publisher role. This is so that the transfer of our US business infrastructure will be reasonably easy (as far as anything to do with owning a small business can be easy, anyway).

Our goal is to make it possible for a new BIPOC editor space to open in the SFWA pro rate magazine field without that person/team having to have money or a ton of industry experience to begin with. 

We will have an open applications period in the second half of June, but application guidelines will be up in early May.

We hope to select our new team by the end of August and let them shadow us from September to December

We’ll help the new team run the year two Kickstarter, which will most likely end in January, and we will turn over the legal ownership of the business on the first of January. 

We will post our official applicant guidelines in early May so everyone has time to think about them for at least a month before the two week application window opens. 

The guidelines will basically consist of a list of questions we have about your hopes and plans for the magazine if you take it over. You can work on figuring out your answers and writing them out before the application window opens. 

Guidelines will be posted on the official Mermaids Monthly Submission Guidelines Page and we will also announce it on the Mermaids Monthly Twitter account, and make a google doc copy in our Public folder.

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Julia Rios is a queer, Latinx writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator whose fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Latin American Literature Today, Lightspeed, and Goblin Fruit, among other places. Their editing work has won multiple awards including the Hugo Award. Julia is a co-host of This is Why We’re Like This, a podcast about the movies we watch in childhood that shape our lives, for better or for worse. They’re also one of several cohosts for The Skiffy and Fanty Show, a general SF discussion podcast, and they’ve narrated stories for Escape Pod, Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. They’re @omgjulia on Twitter.

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