Erin Bried was walking her five-year-old daughter Ellie home from preschool in Brooklyn when the girl turned to her with a question that would change both their lives. "Mom, did you know that space is for boys?" One of Ellie's favorite games was pretending she and her mother were a super-fast, super-powered species from Saturn, so Bried knew the comment — picked up from a classmate — had landed hard. Around the same time, she took Ellie to a bookstore to find a magazine. The covers they found had dolls, lip gloss, and princesses. The articles were about pretty hair and good manners. They left empty-handed.
Bried had spent nearly eighteen years at Condé Nast — first as an editor at Glamour, then as editor-at-large at Self — writing over a hundred cover stories and interviewing every female celebrity from Beyoncé to Taylor Swift. She knew how magazines worked. She also knew that nobody was making the one her daughter needed. In March 2016, she launched a Kickstarter campaign for Kazoo, a quarterly print magazine for girls aged five to twelve. Two filmmaker friends made a launch video that went viral. Neil Gaiman tweeted about it. Roxane Gay tweeted about it. Within thirty days, 3,136 backers had pledged $171,215 — making it the highest-funded journalism campaign in Kickstarter's history.
From her base in Brooklyn, Bried built Kazoo almost single-handedly. She is the magazine's only full-time staff member, writing every page except the fiction, which she commissions from major authors: Newbery Medal winner Erin Entrada Kelly, five-time Pulitzer nominee Joyce Carol Oates, number-one bestseller Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. The inaugural issue featured a drawing tutorial by Alison Bechdel, a recipe from James Beard-nominated chef Fany Gerson, and a story on the Perseid Meteor Shower from cosmochemist Dr. Meenakshi Wadhwa. There are no advertisements, no beauty tips, and no fashion advice. There are science experiments, comics about Josephine Baker, and Morse code puzzles that spell out Maya Angelou quotes.
In 2019, Kazoo became the first children's magazine ever to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence — the industry's highest honor. It reaches readers in forty-seven countries, is printed on sustainably sourced paper in Burlington, Vermont, and has spawned a graphic anthology called Noisemakers: 25 Women Who Raised Their Voices and Changed the World. Bried, who lives with her wife Holly Bemiss and their two daughters — known in the masthead as Kazoo's Tiny Editor and Teeny Editor — has said that if the magazine has a philosophy, it is this: treat girls as if being strong, smart, and fierce is a matter of fact, not an anomaly. Because it is.
Explore Kazoo at <a href="https://kazoomagazine.com/" target="\_blank">kazoomagazine.com