Welcome our new editor: A.A. Balaskovits!
Joel Hans & Justin Daugherty
We’d like to take a moment to officially welcome A.A. Balaskovits, who we are bringing on as the third editor of Cartridge Lit. She will be helming up new social media initiatives, reading submissions, doing the kind of outreach we haven’t even thought of before, and generally keeping the airship afloat with her supreme delegation skills. We couldn’t be more thrilled to have her.
(And, yes, we know there’s only three of us still, but the gif was too good to pass up.)
Cartridge Lit has been around for two years—in that time, we’ve published a huge catalog of stories, poems, and essays, many of which arrived in the two issues we’ve put together thus far (with another coming very soon). We’ve published two chapbooks we’re incredibly proud of, held a chapbook contest, and have three more chapbooks planned for 2016. We think we’ve come a long way in the two years we’ve been around. But, back in late 2015, we (as in Justin and Joel) started to feel as though Cartridge Lit could do so much more. We have a good audience, but the gaming community is absolutely massive, and we think they could find a huge amount of value in what we do—if only they knew we existed.
We started a search for someone with specific skills and ideas relating to social media, and got some remarkable candidates. These kinds of choices are never easy, but A.A. had a combination of skills that we think fit well with the current dynamic: she has deep experience in social media from her time with The Missouri Review, and understands better than we do how to publicize the journal, both on Twitter and via the wider game journalism community. She’s an incredible writer, a gamer through and through, and she loves EarthBound (again, hence the gif), which is always a good thing.
We wanted to give A.A. a space to introduce herself:
Hey! I’m beyond excited to work with Joel and Justin on Cartridge Lit. This is a magazine I’ve admired for awhile, so being on staff feels as exciting as that moment when Crono kicks it in Chrono Trigger and you can finally have the far superior Lucca lead the party. Also, belated spoiler alert.
I’ve been a gamer since I could hold a controller and an avid fan of VG fanfiction, so send your words over! I’m really stoked to read them.
And for the more professional biography:
A.A. Balaskovits lives in South Carolina with three cats. She is the author of Magic for Unlucky Girls (SFWP, 2017), which won the grand prize at the Santa Fe Writers Program in 2015. Her work appears in The Southeast Review, Wigleaf, Gargoyle, The Madison Review, Booth and many others. She’d love to read your SNES RPG inspired work.
All in all, Cartridge Lit is about to become a cooler and more dynamic place than it’s ever been. In celebration of that, let’s all give A.A. the welcome she deserves: tweet her with some well-deserved congratulations!