HOMEROOM is a Seattle-based creative collective for young people of Asian descent to express ideas and collaborate in art, design, community organizing, and social advocacy. 

HOMEROOM is a Seattle-based creative collective for young people of Asian descent to express ideas and collaborate in art, design, community organizing, and social advocacy. Our organization seeks to foster a space to learn and grow together as a community and empower artist and advocates through intersectional representation and visibility. Through our projects and programming, we want to share Asian experiences and uplift underrepresented identities in order to gain a more conscious understanding of the issues within our community and the world around us.

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HOMEROOM will always be a group of artists, dreamers, thinkers, and doers (generally cool people). In the future, this space and the Asian creatives behind it will continue to grow, change, and be challenged in order to move the community forward. In the upcoming year, HOMEROOM is focused on continuing to cultivate a community for Asian Americans where creatives can continue to share ideas and work collectively in art, community organizing, and social advocacy.



This AAPI Heritage Month, we decided to round up our favorite lit mags everywhere that celebrate Asian and Pacific Islander heritage and culture — not just in America.

From gorgeously unhinged youth-led digital zines to award-winning, uber-established journals, this list is full of amazing, diverse magazines that are each making their own unique way in the giant lit mag ocean.

21 Lit Mags Celebrating AAPI Heritage

HOMEROOM

We’re told that life began with a spark of lightning. Or, when Goddess Nüwa (女媧) hand-sculpted humans from river clay. Or, born from the love of soulmates such as Lạc Long Quân and Âu Cơ. Or, when we were reeds, commanded to life by Lumawig, the Great Spirit. Or, perhaps there’s no beginning because we have endlessly cycled through one life to the next. However we may have been created, storytelling has preserved these myths throughout countless lifetimes. When the questions and mysteries of the natural world became too grand to grasp, our ancestors made sense of what they could. They told tales of rainfall being one man’s sorrow, the night sky being the comforting blanket of the moon, our souls being tied to one another by a red string. Heritage branched and began from these foundations.



Each story weaves together to create a rich tapestry of culture and ancestry, creating a shared dialogue to which we are always adding through our own little tales. We may not always gather around fires, whispering parables to ourselves, but we still look out into other corners of this world for shared musings, in both physical and digital spaces. It is a mutual language through which we express ourselves and our identities, ultimately bridging the gap of lost bonds. Thus, with every generation, these collective stories are spun and respun, time and time again. While we may no longer fear demons or the wrath of gods, our monsters have morphed with every passing era, wearing new masks. But despite that, we don’t fight them alone. We seek comfort in commonality and communal experience, and we shall continue no matter how convenience has disrupted our contemporary world. To protect these sacred connections, we must continue to entwine our present with our past by recalling the magic of our forebears, and become the creators of new legends.

HOMEROOM

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