Orange Blossom Award: The Sapphic Sun, and Starting Something New

Members of The Sapphic Sun team gather with copies of the print-only newspaper that launched in October 2024, born out of living-room brainstorming sessions led by founder Kelly Dunsmore and shaped by dozens of local sapphics. What began as a response to limited representation in LGBTQ+ media has grown into a monthly chronicle of sapphic life in Tampa Bay—printed, shared, and saved for the future. Photo by Jefferee Woo

by Avery Anderson

For building new cultural infrastructure—one page at a time

Most new arts projects don’t fail because the idea is bad.
They fail because the follow-through is brutal.

Printing costs. Distribution headaches. Burnout. The slow realization that “launching” is the easy part—and showing up again next month is the work.

Which is what makes The Sapphic Sun feel different.

Launched quietly and sustained deliberately, The Sapphic Sun didn’t arrive as a splashy campaign or a one-weekend zine moment. It arrived as something rarer: a commitment. A monthly, physical, sapphic-centered newspaper created in Florida, for Florida, at a moment when queer communities are being told—explicitly and implicitly—to make themselves smaller.

Instead, The Sapphic Sun took up space. Ink-on-paper space.

In 2025, that decision started rippling outward.

This year, the paper crossed from local love to national notice with a surprise mention on Late Night with Seth Meyers. The late-night nod was funny, fleeting, and easy to miss—but it mattered. Because it put a hyper-local queer publication from St. Petersburg into the national cultural bloodstream without sanding down its identity. No rebrand. No explanation. Just: this exists.

Closer to home, the impact has been steadier—and deeper.

The Sapphic Sun showed up at St. Pete Zine Fest, not as a novelty, but as part of a growing independent print ecosystem. It appeared in arts spaces, community gatherings, and museum events, placing sapphic stories in rooms where they are often absent or tokenized. It became something people could hand to each other. Something that could sit on a kitchen table. Something that could be saved.

And crucially, it kept publishing.

Month after month, the paper documented queer life not as spectacle, but as lived experience: advice columns that function as informal care networks; cultural coverage that treats sapphic joy as ordinary, not exceptional; community calendars that quietly help people find each other. This wasn’t just content—it was connection architecture.

That matters right now.

Florida is a place where queer stories are frequently politicized, erased, or flattened. The Sapphic Sun counters that not with outrage, but with presence. It builds an archive in real time, recording what it feels like to live here now, before the narrative gets rewritten by someone else later.

This is what cultural infrastructure looks like at the ground level. Not buildings. Not endowments. But repetition. Reliability. The discipline to keep making room.

The Orange Blossom Award exists to recognize work that might not call attention to itself—but will be obvious in hindsight. Years from now, when people ask how sapphic culture survived, connected, and evolved in Tampa Bay during this moment, the answer won’t just be “the big institutions.”

It will include a small, stubborn newspaper that decided the story was worth printing—and then did it again the next month.

And the next.

Orange Blossom Award recipient: The Sapphic Sun.
For growing something new—and making it last.

What Are the Orange Blossom Awards?

A month-long series from The Arts Passport celebrating the people and organizations whose quiet, steady work strengthens Tampa Bay’s arts ecosystem. No applications. No campaigning. Just community-driven recognition, released daily in December.