About

GuerrillaReads is an online video literary magazine. It’s a space for writers to share their work with the wider world, through video. Got a piece of writing you’d like to submit? Click here for submission guidelines. Never created a video before? Click here for tips on getting started.

Here at GuerrillaReads we have an unabashed preference for emerging, underappreciated and as-yet-undiscovered writers. Those whose work is published by small, independent presses, and those who’ve never been published at all. That said, if Margaret Atwood, V.S. Naipaul or Jeannette Winterson submitted guerrilla reading videos to us, we’d give them equal consideration.

What is a “guerrilla reading?” It’s a reading of a literary work that takes place out in the real world, not in the rarified atmosphere of your local bookstore, library, conference facility or sports arena. Guerrilla readings take literature to places where literature is not expected. Perhaps even where literature is not welcome.

Why did we create GuerillaReads? As the buying of books (and even the checking of them out from the local library) has moved more and more to the internet, as the consolidation of media companies has led to decreased risk-taking at major publishing companies, and as the local bookstores that once carried small press titles have closed, we as writers need to find new outlets for our work and new ways to connect with readers. More and more, people are online, so writers have to be there too.

At the same time – and perhaps for related reasons – the number of people who read for pleasure in their spare time is falling. If people are too busy to come to one of our readings, then we have to take our readings to them. In the streets, at the mall, on public transit, the places where literature is not expected.

Precedents and inspiration for GuerrillaReads include the Surveillance Camera Players, San Francisco’s fabled Mime Troupe, the grand tradition of street theater, every well-written but smudged ‘zine we’ve ever read, and the Indymedia movement.

Who are we?

Bronwyn Mauldin, Founder and Editor, is cultural worker by day and cultural creator by night. She founded GuerrillaReads to help writers find new ways to connect with increasingly distracted and fragmented audiences. Bronwyn’s work has appeared in the Akashic Books web series, Mondays Are Murder, and in Literature for Life, Necessary Fiction, CellStories, The Battered Suitcase, Blithe House Quarterly, Clamor magazine, TNBBC and From ACT-UP to the WTO (Verso). She is a past winner of The Coffin Factory  (now Tweed’s) magazine’s very short story award. Bronwyn created the multimedia short story collection The Streetwise Cycle and is the author of the novel Love Songs of the Revolution. In 2016 Bronwyn was an Artist in Residence at Mesa Verde National Park. When she’s not writing, Bronwyn is Director of Research and Evaluation for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

Cheryl Klein, Co-Founder, is yet another Angeleno who loves the sound of her own voice. But she prefers to think of it as “creating community via public readings.” Her first book, The Commuters, won City Works Press‘ Ben Reitman Award and was published in 2006. Her novel Lilac Mines was published by Manic D Press in 2009. She has previously co-edited the online queer fiction magazine Blithe House Quarterly. She is an alumna of UCLA and CalArts. She likes to hang out around bakeries, story in one hand, bread in the other.

Melissa Wall, Engagement Manager, is a journalism professor who teaches and studies participatory and mobile media, and is the editor of Citizen Journalism: Valuable, Useless or Dangerous? She’s the founder of the Pop-Up Newsroom, a temporary, virtual newsroom.

Other questions? Post them in the comments below, or contact us at guerrillareads [at] gmail [dot] com.