Kickstarter to Host Bluestockings Comics Fest for Queer and Trans Creators — Kickstarter

It’s no secret I’m an advocate for queer and trans creators. No matter my id as a queer Chinese language American cis girl, it’s 2020 and it’s an empathetic and moral stance to take. What are we right here for if to not make this world extra compassionate? Typically it’s important to begin small to show to others that such a world can exist. That’s precisely what I used to be considering after I partnered with Joan Darkish of Bluestockings Bookstore to host the 2020 Bluestockings Comics Fest, which can be held at Kickstarter’s Brooklyn headquarters on Saturday, July 18.

Bluestockings is a volunteer-powered, collectively-owned radical bookstore and activist middle in New York Metropolis. Their mission is to supply literature and assets about oppression, intersectionality, group organizing, and activism, and sharing the tales of marginalized individuals. I couldn’t have requested for a greater associate to showcase comics by the LGBTQIA+ group.

The 2020 fest will embody panels {and professional} improvement workshops, in addition to a variety of exhibitors. We have now house for as much as 40 distributors and we’re primarily searching for queer and trans individuals of coloration, gender non-conforming folx, immigrants, low-income creators, disabled folx, intersex folx, Center Jap + Arab + North African creators, East + South Asian creators, indigenous creators, and marginalized creators as an entire who’re excluded for one cause or one other from fashionable narratives.

Making a dwelling as an artist is difficult sufficient, and while you’re exhibiting at a conference or pageant, it’s important to hustle to make sufficient gross sales to interrupt even on desk charges, together with meals, lodging, and journey prices. Too usually, the humanities are a pay-to-play sport.

Proper now, we’re getting steerage from members of the Pageant Staff Affiliation to make sure the occasion is totally made for and by the comics group. Our aim is that each long-standing comics professionals and rising artists can use this occasion to make significant connections with one another and with comics followers.

Creators can apply right here. People who’re unable to attend can nonetheless have an opportunity to promote their books on the Bluestockings desk and may use the identical software, which closes at midnight EST on Sunday, February 28.

Workshop and panel purposes may be discovered right here and can shut at midnight EST on Sunday, March 8. Stipends can be provided to workshop leaders. All purposes will undergo a curation course of overseen by Bluestockings volunteers and Kickstarter representatives, with a concentrate on black and brown creators and folx working to focus on social justice points.

We’re so excited to associate with a company like Bluestockings to showcase these unbelievable creators and artists this summer time.

Bluestockings Comics Pageant illustration created by Iasmin Omar Ata.