A select list of professional and personal projects Margot Atwell has led or participated in.

THE NEXT PAGE

The Next Page was a free hybrid in-person and digital conference co-created and led by Margot Atwell, Director of Publishing at Kickstarter, and Meg Frank and Pablo Defendini of Fireside Fiction. It featured a series of conversations on how to foster a more inclusive, fair, and vibrant publishing landscape. Together with writers, editors, publishers, and publicists, attendees of the conference began to consider what the next decade of reading and writing could look like.

Margot Atwell moderated Paying the Way: Economic Sustainability in Publishing. In this conversation, DongWon Song, Joe Biel, and Amy Stolls discussed financial challenges, how to create a thriving business, and how to create reasonable incomes in publishing.

For her work with The Next Page, Margot was a finalist for Digital Book World’s Publishing Executive of the Year and received the Digital Book World Outstanding Achievement Award.

The Summer of Poetry

A season-long celebration of poetry by Kickstarter in 2018. It featured amazing literary projects and poets for, poetry readings live streamed on Kickstarter, and events at Kickstarter’s Brooklyn HQ. The goals were to create tangible support for poetry and poets, and to spark conversations about what poetry is, who gets to write and publish it, how poetry sustains us, and how we can expand the world of poets and poetry.

Exquisite Objects

Kickstarter invited publishing and design creators to dream big and make something truly stunning and out of the ordinary. The care put into the creation of these literary “Exquisite Objects” far surpasses the common paperback—these works incorporate an attention to detail worthy of a museum display.

Signs of Change

Kickstarter invited creators of zines, posters, signs, and other ephemera to make their voices heard with projects to get a message into the community in Summer 2020.

Derbylife.com

Margot co-founded, edited, and ran Derbylife.com, an online roller derby life and culture publication affiliated with DerbyNewsNetwork, for several years during the post-Whip It! era. The website is gone, but its spirit lives on in Margot’s non-fiction book, Derby Life: A Crash Course in the Incredible Sport of Roller Derby.