Tiny Stories to Fight Censorship
This past year, I had the opportunity to serve as the co-chair, along with Daniel Patton, of the Graphic Novel and Comics Round Table's Addressing Comics Challenges Committee. In April 2024, our committee launched an ambitious initiative, a Community Zine Project, which went from an idea to an ALA press release to submissions review/acceptance to printing to folding - so much folding (thank you, folding party friends!) - to giving away the finished zines at the American Library Association Annual Convention in San Diego at the Comics Lounge and Zine Pavilion.
I'm so grateful for our incredible committee members, our supportive mentors and liaisons, the dedicated ALA staff, the GNCRT leadership and fellow committees, and everyone at ALA Annual who helped bring this project to life.
There’s no party like a zine folding party…
The Community Zine Project was designed to help spread awareness about the important work library workers, educators, creators, and communities do to support the freedom to read by creating and submitting original zines. Everyone can do something to fight censorship and protect intellectual freedom. We received zines from published graphic novelists, library workers from all kinds of libraries, educators, and community members, and more! We received so many powerful, moving, informative, engaging, heartbreaking, thoughtful, and inspiring zines and mini-comics that offer so much wisdom and practical advice about how to take action today!
The zines are all available on our Digital Archive - and can even be added to your own zine collections. They have been shared under a creative commons license and are able to be distributed, so long as attribution is given to the creators.
I participated in this project by creating a mini-comic about my experiences with censorship - and the importance and power of coalition building, which you can check out here. My colleague and I also created a zine about de-escalation phrases and practices staff can use here. Clearly, the running theme of my zines (and committee service) is that we’re stronger together when we join forces for the freedom to read, for our libraries, library workers, and communities.
With Banned Books Week/Freedom to Read Week coming up, the Community Zine Project is an excellent free resource for all. You can use them as tools for staff professional development to ensure we're all better informed and have the tools to protect the freedom to read. You can use the zines to support conversations and programs about the freedom to read and book access. You can use them as mentor texts for patrons to create their own zines. Everyone has a story they can share to help us all fight censorship.
I am eager to hear about how library workers have been sharing and using the zines in their communities - and hopefully how they're used during Banned Books Week - and beyond.
Because Freedom to Read is every day in our libraries. And as our Addressing Challenges Toolkit says, “Live to library another day. You are not alone.”