About Us

Affinity Magazine began as a question. In February 2013, a sixteen-year-old girl named Evelyn Atieno was flipping through teen magazines and noticed something missing: the teenagers themselves. The writers were adults. The perspectives were curated for teens, not by them. So she started building something different.

Combining her love of photography and journalism, Evelyn used to walk the halls of Towson High School photographing students and asking them one question: “What do you have an affinity for?” That question became the name, the ethos, and the mission.

Affinity launched in February 2013 as a social justice-focused website and print magazine written and run entirely by teens. From the start, the goal was to cover everything mainstream teen media ignored: intersectional feminism, racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, mental health, immigration, and global politics, all written by young people who actually lived these realities.

Within a single year, over one million people had viewed the website, and the publication had attracted a verified Twitter following and a growing community of teenage writers. What began as a personal blog became a daily publication with contributors across the country and around the world.

By the time Evelyn was 19, Affinity had grown to over 400 writers, millions of page views, and more than 50,000 Twitter followers, all without a single advertiser. The magazine’s refusal to compromise its values for revenue was intentional and unwavering.

Affinity’s readership eventually reached 13 million readers in over 100 countries, making it one of the most widely read teen-run publications in the world. It was cited as a credible source by the New York Times, Huffington Post, Slate, and Mic, and covered by Vice, Teen Vogue, the Baltimore Sun, and PORTER magazine.

Beyond the publication itself, Evelyn used the platform for direct activism. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, she launched the #OpenYourPurse initiative to encourage those with larger platforms to fundraise for vital causes. Affinity also partnered with Plan International USA to host a digital panel during the pandemic, examining how school closures were affecting students worldwide.

Affinity was more than a magazine. It was proof that young people have always had the language, the insight, and the urgency to speak for themselves. They just needed a platform built by and for them.

This site is now archived. Thank you to every writer, editor, and reader who was part of this chapter.

A Note from the Founder

I started Affinity when I was sixteen years old because I was bored, curious, and a little frustrated. The magazines I was reading didn’t look like my life or the lives of the teenagers around me. They didn’t talk about the things we were actually thinking about. So I asked a simple question: why not?

I had no idea what I was building. I just knew I wanted a space where young people could tell the truth, including the uncomfortable, complicated, controversial truth, without someone older softening it for them.

What Affinity became over the next ten years is something I still can’t fully put into words. Hundreds of young writers trusted this platform with their stories. Readers in countries I had never visited wrote to tell us they finally felt seen. Teenagers used their bylines to get into universities, land jobs, and find their voices in ways that extended far beyond anything I could have planned.

To every writer who pitched a story at midnight, rewrote their draft three times, and hit publish anyway: you were the magazine. Not me.

To every reader who shared an article because it said something you didn’t know how to say yourself: you were why we kept going.

My hope is that Affinity’s legacy is a simple one. That somewhere, a young person looks at what a sixteen-year-old built with limited resources and a lot of nerve, and decides that their idea is worth starting too. That the voices of young people are not something to be managed or translated by adults. That they are enough, exactly as they are.

It was an honor.

With love, Evelyn Atieno

Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Affinity Magazine (2013–2023)