Hello, NAAFA supporters! It’s so nice to meet you all. My name is Samantha Puc (she/they), and I’m so excited to have joined the incredible NAAFA team as the new Blog Editor. I’m a fat, disabled, lesbian writer, editor, community organizer, zine maker, and graduate student whose work focuses primarily on LGBTQIA+ and fat representation in pop culture. 

You may have seen my work in the award-winning 2021 book Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives, edited by Bruce Owens Grimm, Miguel M. Morales, and Tiff Joshua TJ Ferentini. You may have also seen me in places like Autostraddle, Bitch Media, The Mary Sue, Polygon, and elsewhere. I’ve been in the media sphere for approximately 15 years, and I’m delighted to bring that experience to the table here at NAAFA.

I’ve been fat my entire life and despite my best efforts, I am still resolving adolescent trauma borne of anti-fatness. For years, I struggled to understand and accept my body, let alone celebrate it, cherish it, or love it. But in college, one of my professors did a lecture on the concept of fatness as politic, and something shifted dramatically in my brain. Eventually, I sought out work from fat liberationists and began seeing contemporary fat writers like Jessamyn Stanley, Rachel Wiley, Jes Baker, and Aubrey Gordon (then known only as Your Fat Friend) on my social media feeds. This pushed me to truly interrogate my relationship to my body and how anti-fatness affected it, which is work I am still doing every single day.

NAAFA has been on my radar since that college lecture, and the work done by this organization is foundational in my own fat liberation work. My goal is always to imagine a fat liberationist future and strive to achieve it, particularly through holding open doors for others and handing off the mic whenever possible. As Blog Editor, I hope to both introduce NAAFA readers to new voices and reacquaint you with ones you’ve heard before, in addition to ongoing resource distribution and callbacks to the history of the organization itself.

I am deeply passionate about the impact of good storytelling and how we connect through experiences that resonate in ways large and small. Throughout my tenure here, I hope the work we produce on the NAAFA Community Voices Blog will inspire and engage you, and that you’ll not only read new pieces, but comment, share, and reflect on them as well. I hope we surprise and delight you. 

You may have noticed that the NAAFA Community Voices Blog is undergoing construction. This summer, a new and improved version of the blog will launch in time for Fat Liberation Month, featuring a more intuitive navigation system, regular posts from a rotating team of contributing writers, and a more robust editorial calendar. We’ve been working hard behind the scenes to make the Community Voices Blog shine the way it deserves, and we hope these improvements will create a better reading experience for our readers.

If you want to contribute to the NAAFA Community Voices Blog, please submit your pitch using this form. 

For updates, watch this space, follow us on social media @naafaofficial, and subscribe to our newsletter!

Thank you for being here! See you again soon.

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