We regret to announce that Crossed Genres Magazine will be closing after issue 36 in December.

Two primary factors led to this decision. First, one of Crossed Genres’ co-publishers, Kay Holt, has been dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for more than two years. It’s made it extremely difficult for her to help with the running of CG, leaving the lion’s share of responsibilities on the other co-publisher, Bart Leib, who’s also working a day job. Magazine co-editor Kelly Jennings, ebook coordinator Casey Seda, and our team of first readers have all been heroic in their volunteer efforts, but we’ve still been unable to keep from falling behind.

The second factor is simply that the magazine has run out of funds to continue. In April 2014 we ran a successful Kickstarter to keep CG Magazine going, but once another year had passed, roughly 90 percent of those who’d pledged to the Kickstarter chose not to renew their memberships. New memberships have been no more than a trickle since. We just don’t have the time, resources, or energy to continuously run fundraisers every year, especially when we also have to fundraise any other projects. Running a fundraiser is an entire project in and of itself – it’s an exhausting and overwhelming process, and we have too few hands to accomplish everything even for the actual publishing projects we have.

We considered a lot of other options to try and keep CG Magazine open, but ultimately none of them were viable without further sacrificing our lives and well-being. We’ve now been running CG, and the magazine, for 7 years (with a year’s break for the zine in the middle), and we have no choice but to scale back.

We’re incredibly proud of what CG Magazine managed to accomplish. Providing a SFWA-qualifying venue for talented voices typically under-represented in SFF was always our goal, and we believe we accomplished that – sometimes we screwed up, but sometimes we succeeded, and each of those was a victory. Each time we sent an acceptance and got back a reply “OMG this is the first time I’ve ever sold a story!”, the thrill never diminished. There’s no greater feeling for an editor than to hear people talk about how personally moved they were by a story you selected to publish. CG Magazine provided all of that and more.

Thank you so much to all our volunteers, past and present, for giving your time to make CG Magazine a reality. Thanks to the other editors who selected stories from the zine to reprint in Best Of anthologies, and everyone who nominated our zine’s stories for awards! Thanks to everyone who backed us with subscriptions, pledges, donations, and help spreading the word. And a big thank you to all the readers who spoke lovingly of reading our stories – especially when you said so directly to the authors.

Best to all,

Bart R. Leib and Kay T. Holt
Co-publishers