Hi. We’re Elisabeth Thurston Fraser and Miya Hirabayashi, founders of YOU + ME* and the ad-free publishing platform Equals. For almost a year, we’ve been publishing essays and photography by talented women on our site. Now it’s time to go offline. 

Our Project

We believe women who write brilliant essays about compelling topics deserve to have their work in print. And that words are best enjoyed in the company of gorgeous photos and considered layouts. It's our mission to publish not just one, but a series of publications that meet those criteria.

The inaugural print edition of Equals includes 30 essays around the theme of "exploration," with four major sections devoted to cartography, uncharted territory, nostalgia, and souvenirs. Our contributors' words are enhanced by outstanding photography and custom illustrations. Here are just a few of our gorgeous spreads:

Over the next year, you can look forward to the second print edition of Equals and essay compilations from many of our online contributors.

Our Contributors 

Below are just a handful of the incredible writers whose work will be featured in our pages: 

Melanie Biehle is a Creative Marketing Strategist, Storyteller, and Cool Things Sharer. She’s the founder of Inward Facing Girl, where she documents her obsessions with creativity and psychology, contemporary art, design, photography, travel, magazines, and life in Seattle with The Adventure Club (aka, her husband and son). She optioned a romantic comedy screenplay in 2005, and her writing, graphic design, and photography have been featured on The Huffington Post, Sunset Magazine, Decor8, SF Girl by Bay, UPPERCASE and more.

Erin Boyle is a freelance writer and photographer in Brooklyn, New York. She writes Reading My Tea Leaves, a daily lifestyle blog chronicling life in a tiny apartment and other adventures related to living simply and sustainably.

Erin Loechner, a writer and former ad agency copywriter in Los Angeles, now resides in a sleepy Midwestern town with her husband Ken, daughter Bee and two dogs. A pioneer “design blogger” featuring trending products and lifestyle images, Loechner recently shifted her focus to a more personal quest for creativity on her award-winning site, Design for Mankind, listed as one of The London Time’s top 50 design blogs in the world. Loechner is a freelance writer for various web publications and magazines whose work has been featured in Glamour, Lucky, Dwell, Readymade, Nylon, Print Magazine and The Huffington Post.

Karey Mackin is a writer who would much rather be an artist, but is slowly coming to the realization that her best pictures are drawn with her words. It changed her life when she read that we all walk past a thousand stories every day, and that the best writers among us see about six. At last count, she's up to three. But only because her family is currently living in Jakarta where there's no shortage of monkeys dressed up as rhinestone cowboys.

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her work has appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times; The Massachusetts Review; Passages North; Propeller Quarterly; Superstition Review; Brain, Child; The Millions and elsewhere.  You can read more of her work at www.randonbillingsnoble.com. In Equals in Print she interviews authors Andrea Barrett, Cheryl Strayed, and Pam Houston about exploration as it relates to writing and reading.

Kathleen Shannon is a branding and visioning consultant for creative entrepreneurs as a co-founder of Braid Creative. She is an art director turned free spirited champion for business-minded creatives. Her “don’t-just-dream-it-do-it” style pervades everything from her work to her life, home, food and adventures at www.andkathleen.com.

Carrie Allen Tipton writes and lectures about classical music, American popular music, religion, and Southern culture. Her work has appeared in Pop Matters, Deep South Magazine, Curator Magazine, Religion Dispatches, Black Grooves, and the Journal of the Society for American Music, among other places. New work is upcoming in Texas Heritage Magazine and the new Grove Dictionary of American Music. For more, visit www.carrieallentipton.com.

You can read about all of our contributors here. 

What We Need & What You Get

We're raising $15,000 to launch our publishing platform. In the near term that includes paying our contributors and support staff, printing our first run, and seeding our second publication. Like our site, this is an ad-free endeavor.

To reward you, as one of our early supporters, our first book is available through this campaign at 15% off. Orders placed during this campaign will also be shipped first. We hope you're eager to purchase a copy of Equals in print for your own coffee table/nightstand/bookshelf, but we happen think it makes a pretty amazing gift too.

Since Mother's Day and graduation season are just around the corner, we've created limited-edition gift packages perfect for the writers, readers, art-appreciators, and explorers in your life. If your gift-giving occasion will take place before the estimated ship date, don't fret; we're happy to send a handwritten card to you or the gift recipient. 

We'll send out emails after the campaign is over to ask for your preferences for your rewards. Thanks for your support! 

Other Ways You Can Help

Please consider sharing this project with your social media networks and/or sending it to a friend.

If you think your work would be a good fit for our site or future print publications, please drop us a line!