$pread

Rachel Aimee, Eliyanna Kaiser, and Audacia Ray

How It All Started

Social movements don’t spring forth fully formed, and the sex workers’ rights movement is no exception. The adage that prostitution is the “world’s oldest profession” may or may not be accurate, but whenever people began trading sex for something they needed or wanted, others marked their actions as immoral, unhealthy, and against the grain. Injustice was born. Yet as people struggle against injustice, amazing things can happen, including stories and documentation of the people living the struggle to exist against the grain.

That is a grand way to imagine a struggle for justice, one that we—the editors and staff of $pread magazine—can lay claim to today, though we didn’t set out with that gleam in our eyes. In the spring of 2004, Rebecca Lynn, Rachel Aimee, and Raven Strega, three young activists living in New York, met while organizing a benefit for PONY (Prostitutes of New York). (The magazine quickly grew beyond these three women, and the “we” of this history was always a shifting one.) We got talking about our frustration with the mainstream media’s sensationalizing portrayal of sex workers as either glamorous, highly paid call girls or drug-addicted victims without agency. We had read some accounts of sex work written by actual sex workers, but most of these were academic essays written for a college-educated readership. We recognized the need for a space where sex workers could write about their experiences in an accessible format—something lightweight and fun to read, that could easily be distributed among sex workers from a wide range of backgrounds. And so, knowing very little about the changing realities of independent publishing in the early twenty-first century, we set out on this journey, picked up and dropped off many more volunteers along the way, and created a magazine.

From the start, we conceived of $pread as a community-building tool that would appeal to all kinds of sex workers, though our notion of “all” sex workers was very much limited by our personal experiences and frames of reference. (Not everyone who worked for $pread was a current or former sex worker. Our staff also included allies who cared about the rights of sex workers. In fact, we were very careful not to disclose which of us were and weren’t sex workers. This allowed people who didn’t feel safe about being “out” to still be part of $pread.) We imagined a magazine that strippers would flip through in dressing rooms. We imagined a magazine that a body worker would hand over to her coworker after she was done with it. We imagined a magazine that a porn performer would browse while in a clinic waiting to do his panel of STI tests. We imagined a magazine that a phone sex operator or webcam performer would read between clients. Since many of us had experience in the sex industry ourselves, we knew that sex workers who work indoors spend a lot of time flipping through magazines while waiting for clients. The magazines that sex workers we knew had in their workplaces were fashion magazines or weekly news tabloids. But what if they had access to a magazine especially for them?

We thought that the simple act of holding a magazine in their hands and knowing that sex workers made this would encourage sex workers to feel like part of a community. Though several among us were bloggers and otherwise involved with and excited about the Internet, we felt that a physical magazine just had more weight. Over the next five years, during which we published four issues every year, we would come to understand so much more about the literal weight of the magazine as we hauled the boxed-up print runs of each issue into our various offices and then to the post office in carefully zip code-ordered stacks.

We entered the arena of publishing at a moment of epic transition from hardcopy to digital. We had been inspired by lovingly handcrafted, desktop-published, and photocopied sex worker zines like Danzine, Whorezine, and PONY XXXpress. We were fans and hoped to be the peers of small independent magazines that had real print runs and distribution, like Bitch, LiP, and Clamor. If we had known from the beginning just how hard everything would be, we almost certainly would have been too intimidated to undertake such a lofty project. But we didn’t. So we did.

Getting Off the Ground

In the process of producing the first issue of the magazine, we tried to cast our nets wide, gathering articles and artwork from people we knew and people we’d like to know. We made “Write for $pread!” flyers and handed them out at strip clubs, brothels, and outreach centers. We met weekly in an East Village coffee shop, the name of which became our default password on our email accounts. We camped out at the Brooklyn apartment of the brave new recruit who stepped in as art director (even though she had no experience) and spent a month solid hunched over her shoulders as she taught herself how to use the design software and laid out the first issue. We planned fundraisers to cover what we estimated to be the expenses of printing the first issue of the magazine, leaving no budget to spare. The final product, which almost didn’t make it to New York after it raised the eyebrows of customs officials when our Canadian printer shipped it to us, had the word “prostitution” misspelled in several places and almost no margins. But we had made it, and we loved it, warts and all.

In 2004, when we sent that first call for submissions into the universe, $pread had a post-office box, a one-page, hand-coded website, and an email address as its “we’re a real magazine!” markers. The call announced that the first issue would be published in March 2005—a totally arbitrary date that we somehow managed to stick to. When submissions began rolling in, we were amazed and intimidated. It was the beginning of the weighty feeling of responsibility that would dominate every staff meeting: all these people, all these sex workers—including sex worker activist celebrities we looked up to—were counting on us to make this happen. The submissions and the notes of encouragement that arrived in our PO box and email inboxes proved to us that we had real potential to shift the isolation that many sex workers were feeling.

With no startup capital and no operating budget to speak of, we set our sights on raising $2,000, which was the cheapest quote we’d gotten from a potential printer (based in Winnipeg, Canada). We raised the money the best way we knew how—by throwing parties, resplendent with burlesque and go-go dancers, leaning hard on the performers we knew both inside and outside of strip clubs, the denizens of which peppered the New York City social scenes we all gravitated toward. We printed flyers and posted them all over the streets of the East Village, as well as in sex work business places. During the hot August leading up to our first fundraiser, in a stifling apartment in Bushwick, we hand-silk-screened piles of two-dollar thrift store T-shirts with the first of many $pread logos: a smirking woman with a bob haircut, holding a lit matchstick, illustrating the magazine’s tagline: “Illuminating the Sex Industry.” The shirts were mostly hideous, but people bought them anyway. And the fundraisers brought something more important than money into the fold: volunteers eager to get involved with the magazine. The $pread family began to grow beyond the founders.

We launched the first issue on March 16, 2005, at a party that advertised the first out lesbian Playboy playmate as our headlining performer (although she didn’t show up). The press, however, showed up in droves, eager to find out what a magazine by and for sex workers looked like, probably expecting porn. We didn’t meet expectations for salacious content, though we joked to Time Out New York, “It’s not intended to arouse, but people are aroused by all kinds of things, so maybe someone will be turned on by sex workers fighting for social justice.” Most sex workers deal with quite enough erotic content on the job, so much to the disappointment of readers expecting breathy Penthouse-style letters, $pread articles covered the business of sex, which as it turns out is often not that sexy. The first issue featured articles on safer sex negotiation skills and analysis of the representation of black women in the US porn industry, and subsequent issues featured reviews of lube and lipstick, health and advice columns, and real stories of labor issues and violence in the workplace.

In our first year of publishing, we often described $pread as a “trade magazine” for the sex industry. Later we expanded this by saying that we covered arts, culture, news, and politics from the perspectives of sex workers, which seemed a better way to describe the magazine’s content as we grew and evolved. By the end of our first year in business, we had published four issues that looked increasingly professional. Thanks to the generous donation of design software and advice from a graphic designer who was a supporter of the magazine, we developed a consistent look.

We also came up with recurring features for the magazine that had clever titles: “Indecent Proposal,” a popular section illustrated by New York underground comics artist Fly, in which sex workers detailed their weirdest requests from clients; “On the Street,” where $pread staff approached unsuspecting people in parks and other public places to ask their opinions about aspects of the sex industry (“What would you say to your daughter if you found out she was a stripper?”); “Positions,” a point-counterpoint column in which two sex workers debated questions like, “Should sex workers be honest with their partners about their jobs?”; “The Cunning Linguist,” a space where we defined specialty terms used by different kinds of workers; “Intercourses,” which featured interviews with potential allies who hadn’t necessarily given sex workers’ rights a lot of thought (a politician, a reproductive rights activist, a labor organizer, a john, and even a priest); “No Justice, No Piece,” our activism how-to column; and more.

Besides successfully launching and coming up with the bread and butter of how every issue would be put together, $pread had a lot to celebrate at the end of 2005: we won the Utne Reader Independent Press Award for Best New Title, beating out several better-funded publications. “They think we’re a real magazine!” we crowed when we learned of the award. And we were. The sense of legitimacy that the award gave us was more important than the business advantages; we gained the confidence needed to motor on. But we also had a lot more to learn.

Defining “By and For”

In January of 2006, our ragtag group trekked up to a rented cabin in the snowy Catskills to have our first retreat. It was at these annual retreats that we addressed topics like “how to avoid burnout and hating each other” (an actual written agenda item) and talked through branding, strategic plans, and generally making the magazine’s future less abstract.

At our first retreat, we bonded over steaming bowls of minestrone and played in the snow with the art director’s pug. But there were also serious issues we needed to talk about. Unsurprisingly, we didn’t always share the same opinions editorially. More critically still, we didn’t yet know who we were as a magazine. “By and for sex workers” got us started, but it wasn’t enough to endure, largely because the idea of “all” sex workers wasn’t actually as inclusive in reality as it was in our intentions.

Despite our differences, we had important common ground: our core value was self-determination; we all believed the magazine was (and should be) a community-building tool; the pervasive public problem we sought to address was stigma; and we wanted $pread to be a forum for all sex workers, not just a privileged few. With these ideas in mind, we hammered out our mission statement:

We believe that all sex workers have a right to self-determination; to choose how we make a living and what we do with our bodies. We aim to build community and destigmatize sex work by providing a forum for the diverse voices of individuals working in the sex industry.

Determining this mission informed our editorial development. Many of us had spent years in a defensive position, talking about sex work with other “progressives,” but tailoring our words to avoid the unpleasant. We weathered the fear that unguarded stories might be taken out of context and used against us. Had we become so used to self-editing that, even with other sex workers, we were afraid to be critical of our sex work experiences? We thought so, and we worried that it was slipping into our editorial habits.

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that our submissions pile trended toward people writing about their more positive experiences. Early on, the pages of $pread were, with a few notable exceptions, filled with happy hookers, cheerful strippers, and flog-happy dommes; if there was rage in an article it was usually directed at the outside world, not the industry itself.

The difficult but radical conclusion we came to changed the magazine: we would take no positions on political or ethical issues. Those whose experiences included critiques of their professions would be actively sought out to balance the self-selecting submissions pile. This was the implication of our newly minted mission statement: the magazine would belong to all sex workers by making space for the full range of experiences and opinions. We spent years both reaching for and failing at this goal, but the reaching made us a better publication.

The subtext of the bias in our pages was that $pread was primarily a space for the voices of sex workers with privilege, partly because we were not and never would be a publication that was able to pay our writers. This was also reflected in who was reading the magazine. Our first readers’ survey showed that our readership wasn’t as diverse as we had hoped. A majority of readers were white with college or master’s degrees. We weren’t reaching sex workers who were trans women, nor we were reaching cisgender or transgender men. As for industry diversity, we weren’t reaching porn performers or street-based sex workers in the numbers we wanted to.

Looking back, we can see why we had these problems. Our staff and contributors largely consisted of white, cisgender women with relative class privilege. This mirrored the US sex workers’ rights movement that was most visible to us, so when we “cast our nets wide” at the founding, we only reached as far as our privilege would take us. Our content slanted in this direction, and as a result, those with less privilege were excluded. (This is not to say that more diverse groups of sex workers weren’t doing organizing and solidarity work. They were. We just didn’t see it.)

At our first retreat, we came up with a plan to address these issues: we would start sending free copies of the magazine to outreach organizations across the country, and include fliers with ideas for contributing to $pread in forms other than 2,000-word articles. We hoped this would encourage submissions from sex workers who didn’t necessarily have a lot of formal education, or even a mailbox.

Gathered in a friend’s condo in Albany for our fourth staff retreat a few years later, we reflected once again on who the magazine was supposed to be by and for. This time, due in part to new recruits with new ideas, we decided to take the magazine in a different direction. At its inception, we had envisioned a magazine that would one day join the shelves of glossies at Barnes and Noble, but with a few years of experience under our belt, this dream was feeling like a practical impossibility. Since a core part of our mission was community building, we decided that broadening our outreach base was more important than pleasing the fickle distributors that would (at least in theory) carry us to major bookstores. So instead of gunning for new distribution contracts, we poured our resources into shipping 30 percent of each print run to mobile vans, shelters, and needle exchanges, reaching sex workers who couldn’t otherwise afford $pread. Once again, we sought contributions with each outreach box we sent out, and further built our outreach distribution program through stronger relationships with organizations and agencies that centered the priorities of low-income sex workers, queer sex workers, people of color who had experiences in the sex trades, and people trading sex for shelter, food, drugs, or other things they need.

Change started to register in $pread’s pages. The scales tipped from consumer shorts on false eyelashes to “how to” tips on safe injection of hormones and drugs; from interviews with the industry’s star performers to reporting on sex worker organizing against “move along” powers of police enforcing Prostitution Free Zones in Washington, DC. It soon became clear that centering different voices in the magazine’s pages fundamentally changed what was being said.

However, we eventually recognized that $pread needed a shift in editorial power. This was acknowledged—if only for a single issue—when a handful of people of color came together as a guest editorial collective to put together an issue (which also happened to be $pread’s last) about race and racism in the sex trades.

From its conception, “The Race Issue” had a process that looked different than other issues. The original motivation for the issue came from sex workers and allies of color who were part of a broader sex worker community that wasn’t being represented in the magazine. Although “The Race Issue” editorial collective acknowledged that $pread played an important role within the sex workers’ rights movement, both as a reflection of what was happening and as an instigator calling for change, the collective also recognized that $pread was part of the problem. Many people of color felt alienated by $pread’s content. They would search the magazine for photographs of sex workers of color, for significant and ongoing contributions from people of color, and for incisive racial analyses of the industry and the sex workers’ rights movement. Although such items existed in fleeting, memorable moments, sex workers of color largely found them lacking in the magazine’s five-year run.

In featuring mostly the voices of white sex workers, the magazine manifested the racism and perpetuated the exclusionary practices that exist everywhere, including in the broader sex workers’ rights movement, where voices of marginalized groups are addressed as an afterthought. “The Race Issue” editorial collective considered how $pread defined the sex workers’ rights movement by writing about it, and about how this could expand who is represented within the movement and who is supported by it. In making the decision to guest edit an issue focusing on racism in the sex trades, the collective hoped to create a more inclusive magazine that presented a multidimensional portrayal of the sex workers’ rights movement and inspired critical thought on the intersection of race, racism, and community organizing with the sex trades. To do so, the collective selected articles that explored and connected individual experiences of racism to larger trends that exist across the various arenas of sexual exchange, such as discriminatory hiring practices, racial profiling, and race-based policing.

The collective saw “The Race Issue” not as the final word on racism, but as the beginning of a conversation. In the letter from the editors, they wrote “[I]ndeed, for as many voices that are represented in this issue, there are several that are not represented—including more representation from people of color with different lived experiences in the sex industry/trades, non-English speakers, greater indigenous community representation, men, differently abled individuals, and many more. Our aim in pointing out what is missing is not to delegitimize the voices present in the issue, but to recognize the challenges of creating a ‘representative issue.’” The editors discussed at length what it meant to be representative. In deciding to focus the issue geographically in the United States, the collective chose to use the term “people of color” in the call for submissions because of its resonance in the United States. In doing so, the collective recognized that this already precluded including the experiences of sex workers dealing with racism in the sex trades in other places around the world and their accompanying movements.

There were hopes that this issue represented a shift in the direction of the magazine, and that it was the beginning of a new phase. Unfortunately, as “The Race Issue” was underway, $pread made a decision to fold due to capacity issues, so what was envisioned as a hopeful shift in new directions ended up being the final issue of the magazine.

As a volunteer-driven project, $pread’s greatest strength was its flexibility, allowing for the magazine to take on new directions with the visions of all the people who created its many issues. In turn, the magazine transformed the people who worked on it, showing us what sex worker-made media could be.

Fitting In

Before many of the staff became involved with $pread, most had been involved in various social justice movements. And the way that $pread became integrated into these social movements was something we all watched closely from our different vantage points.

Since a number of us were LGBTQ identified, we made sure that $pread marched in each year’s New York City Pride March. The LGBTQ community was one of our most consistent allies, partly because both of our communities face stigma because of gender-and-sexuality-based discrimination, and partly because a disproportionately large number of LGBTQ people have worked in the sex trades (which connects to the appalling lack of resources for LGBTQ youth, and the resulting epidemic of homelessness). When we threw ourselves a first birthday party at the opening of our self-curated sex worker visual arts show called “Sex Worker Visions,” the LGBT Community Center volunteered space for the party and hosted the show for months afterward. We could see by the sea of sex workers mixing with non-sex worker LGBTQ folk at the event just how much love there was between our communities.

Our relationship with feminists was more complicated. Many of us had come out of the feminist movement, and there was probably no other social movement that had so much interest in sex work issues, but the 1970s anti-porn crusades of feminism had not gone out of vogue, and some of this interest was decidedly unfriendly. Many of us—including the feminists among us—held a deep distrust of feminism because so many self-described feminists expressed considerable hostility toward sex workers. There was probably no other social movement we interacted with that left us feeling so unsure of our footing.

Our tactic became to reach out, educate, wait, and see. We mailed boxes of our first copies to college women’s studies programs, feminist bookstores and distributors, feminist organizations, and feminist websites. The reaction we received was mixed. One memorable reply arrived in a manila envelope that also contained the shreds of the latest issue of $pread:

Dear Prostitutes,

Were you smoking crack when you sent [a sample copy of $pread] to me? Or did your syphilis get in the way of doing any research into my company? I’d rather turn tricks myself than get within 100 feet of this crap you call a magazine. A true feminist works to secure the dignity and safety of all women, while you only care about yourself and your “liberation.” Meanwhile, you’re helping to destroy the country.

I hope you go down in flames.

(heart) One Angry Girl, Anti Porn Star Extraordinaire

Old Saybrook, CT

Hate mail notwithstanding, the majority of responses from feminists were supportive, especially from our publishing idols at Bitch. Still, there were times when our policy of not taking editorial positions on issues—including feminism—irked. In Issue 1.3, former call girl and author Tracy Quan said in an interview, “an attachment to feminism is, in American life, a sign of needing approval or affection from your mother. It may even be a sign that you spent your childhood in the suburbs.” A few weeks after the issue’s release, Lisa Jervis, cofounder of Bitch, submitted a letter to the editor expressing her disappointment that we didn’t call Tracy on her “ridiculous comments about feminism” and challenging us with this:

You’d feel a responsibility to correct the record if someone said that it was always emotional damage that led folks to work in the sex industry, wouldn’t you? You should feel the same obligation to counteract stereotypes about feminism.

Tracy Quan, from our perspective, was the ultimate expert in what feminism meant (and didn’t mean) to her, and our purpose was to give her, as a sex worker, a platform to speak her piece. As we noted in our response, “We are a publication that tries to foreground the diverse views of sex workers.” And in fact, some sex workers do feel that emotional damage leads people to work in the sex industry, and their views were always welcome in the pages of $pread.

Still, we found ways to work with feminists whenever we could. Bitch welcomed us into its pages by publishing a major feature interview with the editors about sex work as a labor issue. And we partnered with them on a letter that was sent to all New York City Council Members to express our joint displeasure at a silly, publicity-seeking resolution to symbolically “ban” the words “bitch” and “ho.”

Another group that embraced us from the beginning, but that not all of us saw eye to eye with, were the anarchists. Many sex worker activists are politically radical and many of the independent bookstores that sold $pread were anarchist bookstores, so anarchist activists made up a core part of our readership and frequently invited us to table and present at book fairs and conferences. The book fairs were always fun—at one particularly memorable event in Baltimore we decided to give away a free firecracker with each magazine purchase and quickly sold out.

We suppose that this is the inadvertent power of the written word: there was room for the content of $pread to have many different (sometimes even contradictory) meanings to many different audiences. In a broader context, something else happened which we didn’t expect; $pread staff became de facto spokespeople for a growing sex workers’ rights movement in the United States.

What $pread Meant to Sex Workers

Back in 2005, there were very few people speaking up as insider experts about sex work issues. So when news concerning sex work happened, or when researchers or public health officials wanted access to our community, our phones rang. By the end of our first year of publishing, we had become official media spokespeople whose jobs went well beyond responding to questions about the magazine. This role complicated our editorial mission: on the one hand, we didn’t take positions; on the other hand, we didn’t want to lose opportunities as they fell into our lap to correct erroneous assumptions about sex workers in the mainstream media (and to promote magazine sales while we were at it). Mostly, we passed generic media requests along to people in our circles who were most appropriate. But it wasn’t easy, and if we felt that we had too much of the weight of responsibility for our community on our shoulders, these added tasks didn’t lighten our load.

There was no moment when we felt more inundated than when New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was revealed to be the regular client of an expensive escort service in March of 2008. Some of our staff worked with press “on background,” answering general questions about escorting for print reporters, while others appeared on live broadcasts of major outlets and radio shows. While it was good that we were ready for this onslaught, it was also a major distraction: we weren’t a media operation, we were a magazine with a subscriber base that expected us to be focused on our next issue.

This adaptability did allow for $pread to become a known platform and voice for the sex workers’ rights movement. In this role, our “no positions” position was often awkward to uphold. In 2006, when we attended the inaugural Desiree Alliance conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) asked each attending organization to cosign a letter advocating for the decriminalization of prostitution. We were forced to stand up in front of this inaugural, historic meeting of our peers and explain that $pread couldn’t endorse the letter. It wasn’t a popular stance, but we knew that for any sex worker who didn’t support decriminalization, adopting a political stance would effectively be hanging out a “Not Welcome” sign. We kept to our editorial policy with the zeal of a First Amendment enthusiast, and it served us well in making room for a range of ideas and opinions.

The ever-beckoning call to be everything our community needed us to be was a challenge. At one point, we applied for and received a grant from Citizens Committee for New York City to provide free tax preparation services for sex workers. It was a good program, but ultimately it was a time suck; we weren’t a social services organization or a non-profit public purpose group. That doesn’t mean that our forays into extracurricular activities weren’t fruitful in other unexpected ways. In 2007, we collaborated with Transmission, a friendly Christian organization, to hold an Easter service focused on Mary Magdalene. We certainly aren’t all Christian, but for those in our community who are, it was an incredible thing to attend a sex worker-positive Christian service.

At the same time, being the only magazine by and for sex workers meant that we received a lot of support and validation from our community:

“After reading the first issue I started to cry because I saw that there were others out there like me.”—Remy, Minnesota (Issue 3.4)

“I love receiving [$pread] and feel like I’m hanging out with my best sex worker friends every issue.”—Juline, Brooklyn (Issue 2.1)

“I just got my three back issues today and I am savoring them like a delicious treat. Even though I work in a big city, I often experience feelings of isolation as a sex worker. Reading $pread is like finding one person who speaks your language in a foreign country. Thank you so much for giving sex workers a voice.”—Fae, San Francisco (Issue 2.2)

Letters like these reminded us of the important role that $pread played in the sex worker community, and kept us going whenever we began to burn out.

What $pread Leaves Behind

Probably the most important reason we succeeded was that we didn’t know what we were getting into. And yet for five years we put out a quarterly magazine, celebrating each small success as the major victory that it was. At the end of this journey, we leave a legacy of making space for the voices of people who have been silenced, and we feel confident that our community will always have more to say.

This anthology represents a sample of $pread’s significant breadth over its five-year run. Choosing meant making difficult decisions about what to include and what to leave out. Ultimately, the selected pieces collectively demonstrate our mission: how sex workers with a range of viewpoints and lived experiences can come together through the pages of a magazine to listen to each other; and how by doing this, we broaden our sense of community. We were lucky to find and work with an incredible number of sex workers and allies from all over the world. To the volunteers, supporters, and readers who gave their time, sweat, and money to make the magazine a reality, we echo our words in $pread’s final issue:

Because of this outpouring of support, hundreds of sex workers who had never before been given permission to describe their lives or name their dreams for themselves finally had a platform to speak. Because they spoke, thousands more sex workers saw their lives reflected in the pages of $pread magazine, and many of them felt for the first time that they were not alone. Because so many sex workers shed the bondage of isolation, the world has shifted. We feel no hubris in saying this. We watched it shift.

RACHEL AIMEE cofounded $pread magazine in 2004 and was an editor-in-chief for four and a half years. Now a parent and freelance copy editor, she also organizes for strippers’ rights with We Are Dancers. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

ELIYANNA KAISER is a former executive editor of $pread magazine. She is currently raising her two children in Manhattan. In her spare time, she writes fiction.

AUDACIA RAY is the founder and executive director of the Red Umbrella Project (RedUP), a peer-led organization in New York that amplifies the voices of people in the sex trades through media, storytelling, and advocacy programs. At RedUP, she publishes the literary journal Prose & Lore: Memoir Stories About Sex Work and she has taught media strategy workshops for sex workers in New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and London. She is the author of Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in On Internet Sexploration and has contributed to many anthologies. She joined the $pread staff in 2004 and was an executive editor from 2005 to 2008.