Literary Spotlight: Reads & Eats

Novelist and essayist (and The Writer columnist) Yi Shun Lai wanted to start a literary magazine for years – specifically, a magazine focused on writing by marginalized writers about food.

“A few years ago, people started pointing out the fact that most articles about ethnic food – Japanese, Thai, Mexican, etc. – are written by white people,” she says. “When I first started writing for publication in the ’90s, I saw that publishing wasn’t as friendly to marginalized writers as it needed to be, and I wanted to do something about that as well.”