OUR MISSION

 Co-founder / Editor-in-Chief, Head of Media and Public Relations

My name is Ariana. My favorite color is orange (Frank Sinatra thinks it’s the best color, too), my favorite flowers are plumerias, and my whole life I’ve been living in the same little suburb in New Jersey you *probably* couldn’t find on a map. 

My whole life, despite being from your pretty typical small town (re: our favorite things to do are go to the neighboring small towns, take walks, and get tea), has been a little all over the place, especially emotions and experiences wise. The one thing that has remained constant, however, are the arts; I’ve been singing and playing the piano since I was around four, and began to creatively write on my own around eight or nine. As an elementary school student, I checked The Moon Bridge by Marcia Savin out of the library every single week to the point I’d get hundreds of “overdue” statements just because I was so obsessed with it and how well it was crafted. I began to understand then what it meant to create something so everlasting, and how that was what writing really did; how writing is a conversation, an open letter to whoever’s willing to understand. 

Since then, all I want to do is aspire to that as well - be able to connect with someone on that sort of deeper level through my words and creative endeavors; try to better understand myself while knowing that a bunch of other people are doing it right alongside me.

That brings us here - to Potted Purple, a dream that started not-so-surprisingly in the back corner of a tea shop with a forever friend. We hope you’re just as excited as we are to read, learn and inspire.  

Co-founder / Editor-in-Chief, Head of Graphic Design and 2D Art

Nice to meet you! I’m Nina. If you’ve met me in person, you might have an idea of who I am, but if you’ve read my writing or seen my art, you already know me better than I do. That, in part, is why Ariana and I sat down one day at our local tea shop to create Potted Purple. 

As we matured throughout high school and looked forward to our adult lives, we knew that the world we wanted to live in was full of music, art, and beautiful writing. Being from a small town ourselves, those were the parts of life that added color to an otherwise cookie-cutter setting. I have always found joy in the margins of my favorite books (if you’re interested, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld and Almost Home by Madisen Kuhn) and in the lyrics of my favorite albums (if you have a spare hour or two: Melodrama by Lorde, Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers, boygenius by Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridgers, & folklore by Taylor Swift). 

So allow me to introduce myself once more: I am the girl who takes hours to understand trigonometry but only two days to start and complete a book. I am the girl who believes she knows a lot more than she does. I am the girl who paints when she should be writing, and the girl who writes when she should paint. I am a musician, artist, and writer who often likes to question the universe and the meaning of life over ice cream with friends.

When you flip through the pages of our magazine, I hope you are able to meet many more creatives who experience the world in the way you do: in full color.