Istvan Bio 3

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M. A. Istvan Jr., whose creative writing has appeared in over 150 magazines and journals (including Quiddity, Pleiades, Hobart, and the African American Review), serves as a sensitivity reader for narratives that feature marginalized characters (in particular: black, queer, religious, autistic, addicted). On a red-pen mission to flag all texts that offend or stereotype or in any way reinforce oppression, Istvan is equipped to spot even the most figurative and oblique cases of, say, transphobia and black-body rape. Consider, for instance, the following problematic passage (which allusively contains both): “Heads and tails are discrete outcomes of coin flips even though it is possible that a coin will land on its edge or that it will be obliterated in the heinous dark of vacuum death.” Istvan, an editor eager to roll up his sleeves, is also equipped to strip texts of their most insidious threats—unwhiten them, so to say. Consider, for instance, how he rewrites—de[pr]i[v]i[leges]—the coin-flip passage: “As cases of intersex individuals show, sex—not just gender—is a spectrum, which is why the ovary-testicle standard is bogus. And speaking of things ‘inter,’ an interracial child must understand that the fundamental bond between his white mother and his black father is exploitation: the mother—she is the heinous vacuum, leeching the father’s energy to fulfill her supremacist agenda.”