About Utterby

Utterby began in the spring of 2019 at a kitchen table in south Minneapolis, when Margaret Halvorsen, then twenty-two years into a newspaper career, realized she kept clipping the same kind of story. It was never the news itself. It was the small human exchange inside the news: the way a mayor phrased an apology, the way a family argued over a will, the way a clerk said "next."

The magazine we built from that habit publishes long, reported essays and features about language, conversation, and everyday life. We are interested in how people speak to each other at work, at home, and in their towns, and in the moments when speech succeeds or fails. We commission writers who listen well, and we give them the space and the editing to get it right.

We are reader-funded. There are no programmatic ads, no sponsored features, and no trackers that follow you around the internet. Membership costs $7 a month or $70 a year, and it is the reason we can pay our writers fairly and take the time to check every quotation. Non-members may read three stories each month at no charge, because we want the work to be easy to find.

Every essay goes through at least three rounds of editing and a full fact-check. We keep a public corrections page and we answer every letter that arrives at letters@utterby.com. Our voice is literary but not ornate, curious but not arch, and we try to write for a reader who is intelligent, tired, and grateful for something worth reading.

Our Sunday newsletter reaches more than 31,000 readers each week, and its reader-mail section is often the best part of the issue. We are a small team, spread across six states, and we prefer it that way. If you have a story about a conversation that changed something, or a phrase your family has used for fifty years, we would very much like to hear it.

Masthead

Founder and Editor-in-Chief

Margaret Halvorsen

Senior Writer

Tomás Okafor

Features Writer

Priya Raghunathan

Contributing Writer, Places

Walter Lindqvist

Culture Editor

Dana Whitcombe

Staff Writer

Ellis Navarro

Managing Editor and Fact-Checker

Joanna Bettencourt

Membership and Operations Manager

Marcus Delacroix