I cannot express how incredibly excited I am to share Issue 01 with the world! We received over 200 submissions from over 40 different countries during our Fall reading period, and it was an honor to read and immerse in work from people baring themselves from all over the world. 

 

As this is our first issue, I want to speak to why Citron Lit was founded and how grateful and proud I am of our staff for seeing the vision when I first saw Citron Lit as a distant dream in my head. 

 

Kickstarting the Year of the Horse, 2026, I watched a documentary titled 看不見的國家: Invisible Nation, directed by Vanessa Hope. Watching it made my heart swell as I felt from the screen the ineffable passion inside every Taiwanese citizen so incredibly proud of their homeland, yet were being subjugated to hate and discrimination from the rest of the world because of it. 

 

I wanted to do something, to say something, and to let other people say something. But I couldn’t figure out what, until I realized that the very thing I needed were words and community. So I began to think what if? What if I could create a platform so raw and luminescent that other marginalized people feel empowered to express their innermost emotions and feel safe and loved? 

 

I then set out in action to make that dream of such a platform into reality, and I am ecstatic to bestow to you: Citron Lit’s debut issue!

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Amelia Chang 

Editor-in-Chief of Citron Lit