Robin Richardson founded Minola Review in 2016 when she felt Canada needed a home for innovative and potent women’s writing that reflected her own tastes.

Until then, the publishing world had been predominantly a boys’ club. Richardson found that for herself and other young women, getting published meant navigating a world of, at best, bias and, at worst, predatory men.

Minola Review quickly became a cultural phenomenon: a safe haven for established and up-and-coming women like Canisia Lubrin, T Kira Madden, Julie Mannell, and Téa Mutonji, among others.

THE INSPIRATION

Richardson put her design skills to use, creating a minimal website that featured her own photography and a basic sans-serif font. The name Minola Review came from Katherine Minola in The Taming of the Shrew. She had just seen a production of the play at Stratford directed by Chris Abraham and was filled with extraordinary frustration watching a woman broken in real time. That visceral reaction sparked Minola Review as a place for such women to express themselves freely. She made no profits off the initiative and paid contributors and editors from fundraising initiatives as well as out of pocket.

In 2020 she passed the journal along to a protégé and stepped back completely to pursue a new direction. The design and mandate of the journal since shifted and the website no longer reflects her sensibilities.