About Bloom
Bloom is a literary site devoted to highlighting, profiling, reviewing, and interviewing authors and artists whose first major work debuted when they were forty or older… who bloomed in their own good time.
Founded in 2011, Bloom is also a community of readers and makers who believe that “late” is a relative term, not an absolute one, and who are interested in bringing to attention a wide variety of artistic paths—challenging any narrow, prevailing ideas about the pacing and timing of creative fruition. If someone is labeled a “late bloomer,” the question Bloom poses is, “Late” according to whom?
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Paid Subscriptions
For over 14 years, Bloom has been an all-volunteer labor of love. Your financial support is welcome and appreciated. (And, future paid-subscriber special features are in the works!)
Join the Community
You can also find us at Facebook and on Instagram. Publicists, authors, and feature writers, if you’d like to pitch us a feature, please contact us at bloom.editor@gmail.com. Note: We are a small volunteer staff, so please be patient with response time.
We look forward to connecting with you!
Submit to Bloom
At Bloom, we believe it is never too late to take a risk and try something new. In that spirit, we’re thrilled to accept poetry and fiction submissions from blooming authors who first publish, or publish in a new genre (for example, a novelist who publishes a poetry collection, an academic who publishes a short story), at forty or older.
Our summer reading period opens June 15 and will close August 15. We welcome your poetic and literary submissions.
Who We Are
Founding Editor / Poetry Editor: Sonya Chung
Senior Editor: Lisa Peet
Senior Editor: Leah De Forest
Fiction Editor: Shabana Kayum
More on Bloom’s Mission & History
Bloom is for writers and artists of all ages and stages, for anyone who believes that the artistic journey is, and should be, as particular and unique as each one of us; that there is no prescribed beeline to literary achievement.
Bloom recognizes the age of 40 is a somewhat arbitrary marker; we use it flexibly, as more of a guidepost than a cut-off, recognizing that the stories we’re interested in, the life journeys, are complicated. Consider Toni Morrison, and George Eliot, both of whom published their first book-length works of fiction at age 39. Or Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago: he published a first novel in 1947, at age 25; then did not publish again for 19 years, and did not publish another novel until 1980, at age 58.
When Bloom debuted in 2011, we caught the attention of the New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog, the LA Times’s Jacket Copy, The Atlantic, and Flavorwire. Also, read this interview with Founding Editor Sonya Chung at The Huffington Post.
HISTORY
Bloom‘s origins date to September 2011, when the monthly “Post-40 Bloomers” series was launched at The Millions by Sonya Chung. She joined forces with writers Lisa Peet, Erin Ehsani, and Wendy Siegelman to launch Bloom as an independent parallel site and community.
In her introduction to The Millions series, Chung wrote:
Slow, later, and older produces as great if not greater literary work than fast, early, and young. In other words, by focusing too much on youth when bestowing awards and recognition, we miss out — we readers and we writers and we critics, that is. We generate cultural blind spots, and we even have the power to thwart possibilities for alternative creative paths by influencing market and career viability in favor of the young […]
Malcolm Gladwell makes the useful distinction between late bloomers, late starters, and late-discovereds. My bias toward late starters — people who have lived a whole life, or two, or three before seriously devoting themselves to write a book — relates to the collision of life and art: I’m interested in writers who perhaps had the inkling, or the deep desire, to write, to pursue a creative life, for a long time, but for myriad reasons were impeded – internally, externally, a combination of the two. I am excited and inspired by individuals from whom a determined self-reinvention – a digging in, a deep breath, an about face or leap off a cliff – has been required at some point in order to pursue the vocation that has called from within but for which there has been little native tailwind […] the point at which someone not only puts both feet into the writer’s boots but in fact begins to walk — shakily, but unmistakably — on a literary path. It’s the point where “may” morphs into “must,” where the obstacles begin to fade in power and importance.
The monthly Post-40 Bloomers series continued at The Millions through 2019, in tandem with expanded content at Bloom. Lisa Peet, Alice Stephens, Joe Schuster, Shoba Viswanathan, Terry Hong, Susan Sechrist, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, Evelyn Somers, Leah De Forest, and Liz Ross have served as devoted and talented editorial and content leaders over the years.
Thank you for joining us; and may we all bloom in good time.
