Click on a cover to peek inside an issue!

Click on a cover to peek inside an issue!

I founded the multicultural women's mag HUES (Hear Us Emerging Sisters) in 1992, and published it for seven years. My twin sister Tali and our friend Dyann Logwood started HUES as a class project when we were 19 years old. With the help of some awesome woman-power, we expanded it into a full-color national glossy.

The idea happened when Tali, Dyann, and I were trapped in a snowy dorm cut off from main campus. We anointed ourselves "vending maching philosophers," because we spent most evenings munching on packaged snack foods and talking about life until the wee hours.
One of our favorite topics was the ways that the media—particularly women's magazines—made us feel unattractive, worthless, and invisible. We'd all felt excluded from magazines both culturally (Dyann is African American, and Tali and I are Israeli-American) and physically (we were all short "thick chicks").

We decided to create our idea of the perfect magazine. It would speak to women of all cultures and sizes. It would redefine beauty and strength, making it cool for women to be powerful and self-aware. We would invite women to write about their own experiences and identities, from a first-person perspective.

The first issue of HUES was a tiny, TV Guide-sized local zine, which we distributed on campus. Grants from a few student organizations allowed us to print 1,000 copies. We produced 3 more local issues, then decided to go national when Tali and I graduated in 1994.

For the next 3 years, Tali, Dyann and I set up shop in our apartments. We worked with volunteer writers and editors, and cranked out 9 national issues with a 25,000-count circulation to newsstands and subscribers. Feminist leaders Gloria Steinem and Rebecca Walker joined our advisory board, and the magazine was adopted as course curriculum by many universities around the country. We published HUES twice a year, and were never entirely sure where we'd find the money to print our next edition. But each time, we managed to scrape together just enough. As for our own bills, we all juggled a few part-time and evening jobs to cover those.

In 1997, we decided to seek outside funding and hooked up with New Moon Publishing in Duluth, Minnesota. New Moon acquired HUES that October, and a few months later, I moved to Duluth to work in their offices. Tali moved to New York and Dyann stayed in Ann Arbor to complete her Masters degree. The magazine was accelerated from quarterly to bimonthly, and I worked as both editor-in-chief and designer. Although it was nice to have a salary, I got pretty burnt out in the process. In October 1999, I decided to leave HUES. I moved to New York to work as the Associate Editor of Ms. magazine, and to promote my book, Adios, Barbie.

New Moon appointed their circulation director as editor, and produced two more issues before discontinuing HUES. Unfortunately, because New Moon was a small business, they didn't have the capital needed to sustain or mass-market HUES. After HUES folded, Utne Reader bought the mailing list and back issues.

HUES is but a memory today, although I still have yet to see a glossy, colorful magazine that represents such diverse young women in both image, attitude and voice. I often joke that I earned my Ph.D—a "publishing HUES degree" —from the experience.