A record of what students were thinking.

Your Story Matters Magazine is a twice-yearly literary and arts publication for student writers and artists, presented by EmpowerLit. Each issue is built around a single theme and assembled from work submitted by teachers on behalf of the young people in their classrooms.

We publish the ordinary as carefully as the dramatic. A poem about a lunch table gets the same margins as an essay about migration. Our editorial standard is honesty, not polish — we edit lightly, and never to make a student sound older than they are.

What we publish

Stories, letters, reflections, poems, and visual artwork. Every accepted piece runs with the student's first name, grade and school, and nothing more. We do not publish surnames, photographs of students, or contact details of any kind.

How work reaches us

All submissions arrive through the separate EmpowerLit Schools platform, where educators upload and consent on behalf of their students. This magazine site is read-only: it displays published work and accepts nothing from the public.

Why it matters

Students who see their name in print begin to treat their own experience as material worth keeping. That is the entire theory of this magazine, and six issues in, it has held.