Cricket Magazines Want Your Stories of LGBTQ Families

Continuing the ongoing story of if and how children’s magazines include LGBTQ families and people: An editor at Cricket Media has contacted me to stress that they’d love submissions of stories about LGBTQ families.

As you may know, an uproar broke this week when Highlights magazines seemed initially less than enthusiastic about LGBTQ inclusion. They’ve since said they are “committed to” being “more reflective of all kinds of families in our publications”—and Family Equality Council has launched a petition to keep the pressure on.

Competitor Cricket Media has been more inclusive of LGBTQ families and people than Highlights, especially in its magazines for tweens and teens, as I found out from its media relations department. Additionally, Daniel Resner, associate editor of its Spider magazine for six- to nine-year-olds, left a comment here yesterday saying:

I can’t praise my coworkers at Cicada enough for the wide range of voices they’ve published in the past few years. Here’s another piece you might like, from May/June 2016. [It’s a fun comic about drag performers. —Ed.]

But I very much agree our younger magazines have room to improve. The first step is acquiring the content—and we welcome writers from all underrepresented groups, including LGBTQIA+ folks, to submit stories, poems, etc. etc.!

He added via e-mail that “Speaking for my magazine, Spider, for 6- to 9-year-olds, we’d love to see age-appropriate stories featuring families and gender identities of all kinds” and “I would be thrilled to see manuscripts directly or indirectly featuring non-heteronormative families in thoughtful, graceful ways.” He noted that the company’s current general submission guidelines state:

Cricket Media is committed to a diverse literary culture, and we welcome works by writers from underrepresented groups (people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQAI+ folks, and other marginalized peoples).

and he asked that I “signal boost our call for submissions.”

That sounds like an invitation and call to action. I urge you first to read through the full guidelines for the specific Cricket publication you are submitting to, and to make sure you’re familiar with its tone and target audience. 1, 2, 3, go!