Sophia Maggio

Writing Portfolio

I write on Substack, primarily to reflect on the processes of making each zine for my monthly zine club, Scraps.

This summer (2026) and beyond, I plan to share more personal essays about making art, building community as a youngish adult, and how we might live more creative, loving, purposeful lives (feel free to share your tips!).

Some of my past projects are linked below. If you’d like to chat about the type of writing I can do for or with you, please send me a message at maggioso@msu.edu. You can also view my freelance profile and client testimonials on Upwork.

Journalism

I have contributed to local and national publications including The Spokesman-Review, My Mercer Island, and Total Food Service (TFS).

TFS:

My Mercer Island:

SEO Writing

As a writer, I regularly follow changes in SEO, particularly as AI becomes more sophisticated and transforms our online search experiences. Below, I’m maintaining a running list of resources that have helped me write searchable and accessible content for online audiences. I hope they help you, too!

Content Strategy

As a writer with a background in rhetoric, I’m especially attentive to audience. Rhetoric is an ancient and multifaceted field; but to provide a very basic definition, rhetoricians study how writers use language to influence an audience.

Rhetoric gets a bad rep as a method of deception. That’s bad rhetoric — “rhetrickery,” as one rhetorician described it. I’m an advocate of employing rhetoric for good causes and for the good of people.

Content strategy is about planning the creation, promotion, and measurement of marketing content to create meaningful interactions that meet the needs of an audience. This, in other words, is rhetoric, and good rhetoric when the strategy is collaborative and thoughtfully researched.

The following sample showcase rhetoric-in-action to support the content strategy of various clients.

1) Style Guides for Michigan State University’s Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures (WRAC)

As a member of the WRAC Communications team, my teammates and I created three separate editorial style guides for our news articles, social media content, and website content. We view these guides as living documents for future graduate students and employees to reference, add to, and revise as needed.

Style guides are an essential part of content strategy, specifically when thinking about “how and where the content will best meet users’ needs” (Kaley, 2022). For WRAC content, the “users” or audience members are primarily students, faculty, and prospective students and faculty. Our style guides were therefore designed to make written and visual elements consistent across platforms, ensuring a smoother reading and viewing experience for our audience.

Throughout the creation of these documents, our team referenced the Brand Guide of the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) at Michigan State University, which outlines core features of CAL’s brand as an extension of the university.

➡️ Link to News Style Guide

➡️ Link to Social Media Style Guide

➡️ Link to Website Style Guide

All three guides were created on Canva.

2) WRAC News Coverage

As a Communications Specialist, I wrote news articles for the WRAC website, several of which are linked below. These articles involved interviewing, photographing, researching, and referencing our style guide for news content.

  1. “Exploring the Role of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education” (October 2023)
  2. “‘Paving the Way’ with Paintings and Poetry” (January 2024)
  3. “WRAC Offers Course in Writing as Participatory Science” (February 2024)
  4. “WRAC Faculty and Graduate Students Collaborate to Teach Undergraduate Writing Courses” (March 2024)
  5. “Where Are They Now? Three Alumni from the Minor in Writing Program Share Their Stories” (May 2024)

3) Website Design and Social Media Management for the Red Cedar Writing Project

From 2024-2025, I managed the website and Facebook page of the Red Cedar Writing Project (RCWP), Michigan State University’s site of the National Writing Project.

I reorganized the RCWP website by archiving old content and editing and promoting current information (both written and visual content). I also marketed RCWP events and news through Facebook.

Personal Essay

As noted above, you’ll find personal essays about zines and other creative topics on my Substack!

Miscellaneous Fun

  • My artwork was published in the Spring 2024 edition of Thimble, a literary magazine “based on the belief that poetry is like armor. Like a thimble, it may be small and seem insignificant, but it will protect us when we are most vulnerable.” Check out the online edition here (featuring lots of poetry and visual art by other awesome artists!).
  • To read some of my most esteemed creative writing, visit @dan.thetravelingtroll on Instagram. Dan is wildly observant, lightly raunchy, and mildly outraged in response to most circumstances. He is known for his outsized opinions and whimsical experiences of everyday experiences, from riding the bus to wandering the aisles of Kroger. Over the years, the boundary between Dan and Sophia has become increasingly blurred; I often sign off my letters and zines as “Soph + Dan.”
  • I also published some paintings and an artist’s statement in the Summer / Fall 2020 edition of Lunch Ticket, a literary and art journal from the MFA community at Antioch University Los Angeles.
  • I contributed to a 2024 article in the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics (JMOR) titled “Writing Identity, Identity Writing | Identity Matters, Matters of Identity.” Read more from me and the other fabulous authors here!
  • My master’s thesis! A multimodal exploration and discussion of zines, their importance to communities and creators, and why I love them so freakin’ much. I interviewed three incredible zinesters for the project and then responded to their insights with a reflective “takeaway” zine, which is scanned and included in the appendix of the thesis.
    • If you are unable to access the thesis through the hyperlink, please copy and paste the bolded link from the citation below into your URL bar.
    • Maggio, Sophia. Creating Zines, Constructing Place: Place-Making and Community-Building Practices of Zine Makers, Michigan State University, United States — Michigan, 2025. ProQuest, https://d.lib.msu.edu/etd/52390?q=sophia%20maggio
    • If THAT doesn’t work, email me (maggioso@msu.edu) and I’ll send you a PDF copy!