Contribute
We’re excited to work with creative producers of all stripes—writers, photographers, illustrators, designers, data artists, developers, and more.
We publish critical, compassionate, and creative takes on food, in search of more just and joyful relationships with each other and our earth. Check out our manifesto for the ethos that guides our publishing.
Please send pitches and ideas to hi@staycurrant.com. In the email title, let us know what category you’re pitching in, e.g. “[PITCH] Personal Essay” or “[PITCH] Open Source Data x Chinese Restaurants.” If you have a headline in mind for your piece, include that in the email title, too. If you have links to relevant past stories—or relevant experience you want to share!—we’d love to see them. (For example: If you’re a farmer who wants to write about farming but hasn’t published, don’t be shy to pitch; we see your experience as enriching to your story.) You can expect a response from us within two weeks. If you haven’t heard back by then, feel free to follow up.
Real (money) talk: We're bootstrapped and not currently at a place to offer monetary compensation. (Our full team is volunteering their time and work right now.) What we can offer is editorial guidance and top notch creative production—our team's time, craft, and commitment to helping you make your piece the best it can be. We understand this may limit the spectrum of pitches we receive, and we're actively working on a sustainable business model that includes compensation for collaborators.
We publish stories with evergreen messages and truths, whose questions echo long after attention has shifted to another story. We’re especially interested in work that pulls apart the complex threads of our world, from class, race, and gender to geography and policy.
We’re currently accepting:
— Personal essays (written, visual, or both!)
— Creative nonfiction essays
— Reported stories
— Larger features and multimedia projects (purposefully broad—pitch us on your dreams!)
What to include in your pitch:
— Working headline, if you have one
— Story idea: What’s the core question or provocation of the piece? If it’s a reported story, what sources and research do you have in mind?
— How might this challenge audiences on their existing assumptions and habits? Our readers are global and multidisciplinary.
— How does the story thoughtfully engage with context and history—and if feasible, envision changes toward more equitable futures? We're not looking for sensational or ungrounded speculative takes. We're interested in words with considered weight—even better if rooted in applied experience.
We’re always open to experimenting with form. If you have ideas for visual integration, we'd love to hear them! If not, we'll help flesh them out with you.
Pitch us a visual story—this could be a personal essay, a journalistic story, a conceptual art exhibit, a recipe series, or a funky wild card. Please cover the questions as noted above for written pieces, and include examples of relevant past work.
If you don’t have a specific story in mind, you can also join our contributor network, and we'll be in touch for any potential commissions for written pieces and features. As with pitches, drop us a line at hi@staycurrant.com with your portfolio.
Currant is an amorphous and growing publication, and what you see on the website is just the tip of the iceberg. We're technologically ambitious and always seeking to bring more technical rigor to our publishing. Graphic and motion designers, web developers, audio engineers, data analysts, whatever kind of curious tinkerer you are—we’d love to be in touch.
Right now, we’re excited about interactive thematic features, data visualization, and community-driven archival projects. Think: reconstructing a 3D walk through an open-air market, analyzing the evolving influence of food media figures, drawing from the are.na API to fuel a public recipe archive. If those sorts of projects excite you, shoot us an email!
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