From the Editors: April 2026

Jessica Hunter

The Erie Reader is 15 years old – and it feels like both the very publication you hold in your hands at this moment and the City of Erie itself are at a coming-of-age moment. We're hitting our stride. We're improving in all the best ways while we let those old habits and self-doubts fall away. We're Holden Caulfield accepting our vulnerabilities, we're Huck Finn growing into our own code of ethics, we're Anne of Green Gables finding a pragmatic use for our imaginations. And I have the fortunate privilege of getting to be a part of it all.

You may have noticed from the cover and theme of the issue that we're "pulling back the curtain" this month to reveal the folks behind the Reader who help keep us going. We're sharing an intimate interview with our founders (those dudes who really, truly make everything run) Brian Graham and Adam Welsh – who've been friends since they were kids, growing up in their close-knit eastside community, and who launched this alt-weekly at a time when very few people in Erie were even familiar with the concept. We're sharing the stories of some of the Reader's current contributors – the folks who raise their hands every month to pick up event spotlight assignments or to pitch clever ideas. And we're throwing it back and revisiting some of the folks who were around at the very beginning, as Ben Speggen catches up with some "early days" Reader folks.

And I thought I'd take a moment, in this space that has become mine over the past few years, to pull back my own curtain and introduce myself. "The Editors" is a very thin veil, as 99 percent of these columns since 2022 have been penned by myself, Erin Phillips, the managing editor of the Erie Reader – and if you know me or my voice, you probably already realized that. Hello there!

I've been writing for the Erie Reader since 2019, receiving my first paycheck quite literally on the exact day that Erie County locked down for the foreseeable future during the COVID-19 pandemic. My first published feature was a story about Lustron homes in Erie (which are prefab, post-war, government-funded, futuristic, metal-clad homes of which Erie has many if you know where to look). And since that story, I've penned over 145 articles, not including those published under the moniker of "The Editors," which is what I became in 2022 when I was selected, by some combination of benevolent magic and self-unrecognized skill, as the managing editor after my predecessor Nick Warren stepped down.

Before I started writing for the Reader I was a stay-at-home mom for 10 years to my children, who are now 14 and 8 years old, while concurrently starting an Instagram account called Old Erie On Foot which, surprisingly, became wildly popular and changed my life in countless ways. Before all that, I was the adoptions manager at the Erie Humane Society. Before that, I had a nomadic job selling posters at colleges all across the country with my (to-be) husband. Before that, I studied English literature and art history at Penn State. Before that, I went to Mercyhurst Prep (where my favorite subjects were, surprise, English and art history). Before that, I went to St. Luke School. And before that, I was born at Hamot Hospital.

Somewhere between being born and going to high school, I realized that I loved to read and write. Both activities always came naturally to me but I never really thought about making writing a career. Upon reflection, though, I almost always found a creative outlet in it. Composing clever and touching Instagram posts about old local buildings, writing the cage cards for all of the adoptable pets at the shelter (and making them fun and catchy enough to hopefully snag an adopter's eye), writing paper after paper in college, and finding ways to make them feel creative and interesting, not just academic. In that way, maybe I was born to be an editor for an alt-weekly. In the position I hold now, I've honestly never felt more like myself. I get to be creatively challenged every day, I get to read all of the great content our writers come up with before anyone else does, and I get to write about all the things that I feel are important and interesting. And it's somehow my job? Somebody pinch me.

I think I've officially come of age at 44, right alongside the Erie Reader.