Miss Anthology says Goodbye

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Dear friends, partners, and fellow creators:

After 3 years of serving the Portland comics community and careful consideration, we’ve decided to end our programming and anthology.

 

Miss Anthology began as a passion project between Melanie Stevens and Emily Lewis while Melanie, now a professor, educational director, artist, and curator was still in grad school and Emily, now a graphic designer and cartoonist was a recent graduate and working part time as a barista. We were later joined by Mack Carlisle, who helped develop the early stages of program with us. Melanie and Emily both had little to no access to comics as kids and wanted to give young Portland creatives an opportunity to learn about comics in our community in a LGBTQIA2S+ safe space, help publish their comics, and provide paid teaching opportunities to local industry professionals.

We secured several grants, worked closely with Marrow PDX, Books with Pictures, and Portland Community College, and hired a team of 15 passionate, brilliant, and knowledgeable instructors, editors, and admin staff to help about 100 bright and talented students and creators accomplish their creative endeavors. We’re so proud of the work we’ve accomplished together over the years, seeing our students’ skills grow, seeing some graduate and go to college to publish their own webcomics and zines.

We’re sorry to deliver such sad news in the new year. Although Miss Anthology is closing its doors, Melanie and Emily will still be active in our local community and will lend support and make connections for our creators whenever we can.

Thank you,

Miss Anthology
Emily Lewis and Melanie Stevens

Awesome Portland Micro-Grant

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MayGrant

Friends, it’s with a warm heart that we share with you some FANTASTIC news–we’ve been awarded an Awesome Portland Micro-Grant! If you’ve been following Miss Anthology, you might be aware that 2019 is the first year that we did not receive any financial support, resulting in a reduction in our programming. But, we believe in our mission, and presented a 3-minute pitch to the Awesome Portland Trustees on May 28th and walked away with the grant, ensuring another year of hands-on comics workshops brought to you by Miss Anthology.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us over the years, we are infinitely grateful and excited looking forward to 2020 and beyond.

If you’d like to keep up-to-date with our workshops, events, and appearances, follow us on social media or sign up for our monthly newsletter!

 

 

Miss Anthology 2019 Programming

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I want to begin by thanking all of our community supporters, grant foundations, creators, teachers, fellow admin, and designers who have made the past two years possible. You all have been an exciting and wonderful part of making Miss Anthology an incredible comics resource for female and LGBTQIA2S+ kids and young adults to learn and share their work.

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Due to a lack of funding we will not be able to have as many workshops this year, and they will not be exclusive in any way. Instead, we will host three pop up workshops taught by female and LGBTQIA+ instructors that will be free open to all who want to attend, but we will accept donations to continue paying our teachers and providing students with supplies.

Our workshops are still going to be very similar, but with a few changes. We’ll have only traditional media this year, but hope to make brand new classes with new content. We will still have a strict safe space policy to make our workshops as inclusive as possible. (See our safer spaces policy here.) There will be a zero tolerance discrimination and harassment policy for adults in our workshops. If an adult makes someone feel uncomfortable, they will be asked to leave.

We’re still working on the details of our pop up summer workshops, but here are the dates you should mark on your calendars!

July 13th 
Workshop TBA
Taught by Sabine Rear
Marrow PDX, 7025 N Lombard St, Portland, OR

July 27th
Forest Park Hike + Draw
Taught by Kerstin LaCross (pronouns they/them)
Forest Park (exact location TBD)

August 3rd
Making + Writing Comix
Taught by Emily Lewis (pronouns she/her)
Books with Pictures, 1401 SE Division Street, Portland, OR

August 10th
Workshop TBA
Taught by Jenny Vu (pronouns she/her)
Location TBA

2019 call for comics

We will be publishing our book via Kickstarter again this year and will be accepting submissions from April 1st until June 1st. Any sales from the book will go toward funding the following year of Miss Anthology. We expect to have the book complete by October in time for fall comic/zine festivals and of course our annual anthology release party.

Warmly,

Emily Lewis + Miss Anthology Staff