Zinesters as Librarians, Librarians as Zinesters

August 27, 2027
12pm Eastern
Online
Free

Zines collections and workshops are important outreach for libraries to connect with communities. At the same time, many librarians are also zinesters.

How does being a librarian influence our zine practices? How does being a zinester influence our library practice?

Join panelists Dez Alaniz, Violet Fox and Dawn Stahura for a conversation about overlapping identities as library workers and zine creators, and how the one often influences the other.

Presenter Info

Des Alaniz

Des Alaniz (he/they) is an educator, archivist and zinester who currently lives on occupied Chumash-Barbareno lands on the Central Coast of California. Dez works as the Director of the Presidio Research Center in Santa Barbara, CA. They earned their M.L.I.S. from Simmons University in 2018. He has created and facilitated classes and workshops around zines, research justice, teaching with archives, and activist archives for academic and public audiences for nearly a decade. They are the founder of honey boy press, a zine distro based in Santa Barbara, California.

Violet Fox

Violet Fox is a metadata librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She earned her MLIS from the University of Washington iSchool in 2013. She is one of the co-organizers of the Chicago Zine Fest and the Twin Cities Zine Fest (Minnesota), and she often helps put on the Zine Pavilion at the American Library Association annual conference. Find many of Violet’s zines at her website, violetbfox.info.

Dawn Stahura

Dawn Stahura is a Research and Instruction Librarian for the Sciences and Health Sciences and the Zine Librarian at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts as well as an adjunct instructor at Indiana University and Louisiana State University. She earned her M.L.S. from Indiana University in 2009, an A.A.S. in Business Management from Ivy Tech Community College in 2006, and a B.A. in Creative Writing from Purdue University in 2001. She is currently enrolled in the MA English (Poetry Writing Focus) program at Salem State. Her first book, Educating with Empathy: A Holistic Framework for Teaching the Research Process, was published in March 2025 through Litwin Books. She has written and published zines since 1992 and has helped public libraries start their own zine collections as well as how to host zine fests. She is the creator of the ACT UP evaluation method that has been globally adopted and adapted in all kinds of libraries and library instruction. To find out more about her work, please visit her website at www.dawnstahura.com.