New Lit on the Block :: Olympe
NewPages welcomes Olympe, a new online publication of global writing, visual art, and photography by women ages 16-24 that “describe the female experience and explore what women’s issues are relevant” to each contributor.
The concept for Olympe came about as a result of the Kravis Center for Performing Arts‘ “Changemakers: Global Women/Global Issues” workshop at the beginning of 2022. The editors got to know one another during this workshop while exploring women’s issues through lessons from Dr. Susan Gay Wemette where they created projects as a team. After that event, the team put what they had gained from those projects into creating Olympe as a way to bring awareness to women’s issues and amplify women’s voices as they share their stories through writing and art.
“The name Olympe,” explain the editors, “comes from Olympe de Gouge, a political activist and philosopher during the French Revolution who wrote The Declaration of the Rights Woman. She was not long after executed for advocating for the equality of the sexes. We created the magazine in her honor, as a forum for women to express their ideas through visual art and writing.”
Accepting submissions during the fall and spring, the team of founding editors includes Stella Bronwyn Morris, a freshman at Rollins College majoring in international relations; Isabella Lobo, a teenage artist, writer, and feminist from south Florida; Adriana Marquez, an artist with experience in multiple fields of art; Evelyn Peyovich, a Benjamin school student (‘24) and a contributor at Olympe; and numerous others who assist with the publication.
As the publication continues to build content, the editors have begun to host contests and are hoping to develop themed issues and add interactive polls to their website “to provide insight into the lives and perspectives of our readers.”
For now, the editors say that Olympe readers can “expect to find non-fiction, including essays and editorials written by our team of staff writers and our founders, and upcoming issues of fiction and visual art. They can also currently find many of the original writings from the class the founders completed together that inspired the creation of Olympe in the first place.”
Olympe is free to read online and, as of this writing, no-fee submissions are open.
