Just over a year after they acquired online literary magazine the Rumpus from Alyson Sinclair, Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman are unveiling not simply a redesigned website and new logo, but also a publication intended to better serve today’s readers.
“We’ll still be covering with the same rigor and integrity, fiction, essays, poetry, book reviews, author interviews, and so forth,” said Millman, the host of the Design Matters podcast, who is a co-owner of Print magazine. She serves as the Rumpus‘s culture editor and creative director, while Gay serves as editor. “But we’re also going to include more design criticism, art criticism, and overall cultural coverage. The soul of the writing and the coverage will be very similar; topically, it will be different.”
Millman added that “with America being seduced by AI, there’s going to be even more of an appetite for craft, for soul, for work that still is original and heartbreaking and bone-tingling. More than ever there needs to be original voices that are beholden to no one but the reader.”
Politics, she says, will also factor in the Rumpus’s content. For instance, Gay, Millman, and their staff are planning a feature that will run in July in which writers, artists, designers, and other creatives will be invited to respond to the questions, “What is freedom? What does freedom mean to you?”
“That might be sexual freedom, it might be reproductive freedom, it might be political freedom, it might be freedom of speech, any number of things,” Millman said. “We haven’t gotten responses yet, as we’re just putting out the ask. But that’s the type of coverage we want to be providing.”
This month, in a nod to its past, as well as to Pride Month, the Rumpus is launching its inaugural “The Rumpus Pride 30” feature, which is slated to run every June. The series showcases 30 LGBTQ+ writers whose work has been published in the Rumpus since the magazine debuted in January 2009. A digital anthology featuring essays, excerpts, and work culled from the archives by each of these writers—curated by Gay, Millman, and deputy editor Noah Rosenzweig—is being sent to members throughout the month.
The Rumpus is also expanding and diversifying its audience with the launch of a Spanish-language vertical, El Alboroto, as well as a column both edited and written by people who are or have been incarcerated.
“We’re not merely translating the offerings on the Rumpus website,” Gay explained of El Alboroto, which is Spanish for disruption or disturbance. “We’re publishing work that was written in Spanish and intended to be read in Spanish.”
Three editors who are fluent in Spanish and who, Gay added, “understand the power and the beauty of the Spanish language,” will be in charge of El Alboroto, which will “start small” with a few pieces each month.
As for the column, Gay said that it was inspired by a conversation several years ago with literacy advocate Reginald Dwayne Betts, the founder of Freedom Reads, as well as her philosophy that “great writing happens everywhere.” She emphasized how essential it is “to give access to people and voices that sometimes are not as much prioritized in this world. I don’t think that people’s humanity disappears the moment they enter prison.”
Noting her own long-standing association with the Rumpus, Gay, who was its founding essays editor, described becoming co-owner as “a full circle moment, a sense of coming to a literary home again.”
She added that she and Millman “are most excited about honoring the tradition of this magazine that has remained independent and has been publishing consistently for 18 years, while also trying new things. We want it to turn a profit and be self-sustaining, but we also want to publish really great writing and be a good source of cultural coverage in a world where cultural coverage is disappearing. We’re trying to walk before we run as we get settled in, but we have grand ambitions, and we hope to realize them.”
A version of this article appeared in the 06/22/2026 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: