Friends of The Sun

Thank You for Making Our Work Possible

As The Sun enters its fiftieth year of publication, we’ve been more grateful than ever for the readers who have sustained our ad-free, nonprofit magazine above and beyond the cost of a subscription. We simply wouldn’t be here without the dedication of our readers. Friends of The Sun have kept us in circulation through paper shortages, postage increases, and technical difficulties. Here are just a few ways your donation made a difference last year.

Our Complimentary Subscription Program

With your help we have been able to continue providing The Sun at no cost to those in need. Last year, we mailed nearly a thousand free subscriptions, the majority to incarcerated readers. We’ve also continued our partnership with MagLiteracy, an organization that distributes the magazine to communities via food pantries, shelters, job-training programs, and more.

Our Writers and Photographers

Thanks to you, we’ve been able to seek out and elevate new voices with fresh perspectives, including vulnerable writing from Jacquelyn Gill in her first-ever publication, and Zoë Bossiere, who is new to The Sun. We’ve also published writing that experiments with form, such as Michael Torres’s “Essays for My Daughter,” and promoted writing that reduces the stigma around mental health, like Kathleen Founds’s “My Thoughts Are Not My Thoughts” and Gary Percesepe’s “The Count,” which was his first piece in The Sun. We published poetry that is both healing (“More of This, Please,” by Emily Sernaker) and heartbreaking (“What I Didn’t Say,” by Beverly Hartz — her first time in The Sun). Interviews have been provocative, deep dives on topics such as declining human fertility, the ethics of eating meat, and the racism inherent in social welfare and healthcare.

This also marked the first full year of our new feature, A Thousand Words, a space for photographs that tell a story all on their own. We welcomed a hundred new writers and photographers to our pages, of which more than half were photographers, including Nicholas Small, whose image was featured in November’s A Thousand Words, and Hilda Conrade, whose October image was her first-ever published photograph. Rex Wilder’s, Abbie Brandao’s, and Julie Berson’s cover images were their first photographs to appear in our pages.

Operating Support

This past year presented many challenges. Subscriptions are the lifeblood of any healthy magazine, and technical problems with our website greatly impacted our subscription revenue. Your donations helped us weather the setbacks without sacrificing the quality of the magazine.

We’re grateful for your support as a Friend of The Sun. Thank you.