Sassy Magazine: Our First Media Foray

Our interest in publishing began at 18, when Tali won a contest to design a Reader Produced Issue of the beloved Sassy magazine. Sassy was as cool and real as any girls' magazine could get. They flew Tali and a bunch of teens to New York City for 3 weeks to design, write and edit the issue. Thus sparked our love of both New York and self-publishing.

We published HUES Magazine from 1992-97

Before we became The AstroTwins, we founded the multicultural women's mag HUES (Hear Us Emerging Sisters) in 1992, and published it for seven years. We started HUES as a class project at the University of Michigan when we were 19 years old. With the help our friend Dyann Logwood, and many cool people from our community, we expanded it into a full-color national glossy.

We'd all felt excluded from magazines both culturally (Dyann is African American, and Tali and I are Israeli-American) and physically (like most women, none of us were supermodels).We decided to create our idea of the perfect magazine. It would speak to women of all cultures and sizes. It would redefine beauty and strength, making it cool for women to be powerful and self-aware. We would invite women to write about their own experiences and identities, from a first-person perspective.

We worked with volunteer writers and editors, and cranked out 9 national issues with a 25,000-count circulation to newsstands and subscribers. The magazine was adopted as course curriculum by many universities around the country. In 1997, we decided to seek outside funding and hooked up with New Moon Publishing in Duluth, Minnesota. New Moon acquired HUES that October, published it until 1999.

Ophira created Body Outlaws, a collection of multicultural body image stories

Body image is a huge cause of ours, so Ophi put together the multicultural collection Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty & Body Image (Seal Press, 1997). We wanted women and men to have real-life recipes of the journey, struggles and triumphs involved in loving oneself "through thick and thin." Now in its third edition, Body Outlaws has been translated into Greek and Chinese, adapted as a stageplay and is used as curriculum in schools around the country. Learn more about the book at www.bodyoutlaws.com.

Check out her body image community site at www.adiosbarbie.com.