Zines are having a renaissance in the halls of the Sweetland Center for Writing—and well beyond! While we are not drowning in glue sticks and xeroxes yet, from community events and classes to personal projects and hands-on workshops, zine culture is thriving at U-M.
Several SWC faculty have been producing wildly creative zine series. Angie Berkley launched an AI-themed series titled “Botzine.” T Hetzel has been developing “The Flummox,” a perimenopause-themed zine now in its fourth issue, each installment featuring not only her own experiences but those of many women who have filled out a Flummox questionnaire. Every issue adopts a fresh aesthetic and form—one even arrives packaged inside pad and tampon wrappers. T was accepted as a member of the Institute for the Humanities Fellows Program specifically to work on this zine! April Conway has also been a prolific zinester this past year, expanding a playful, personal zine portfolio with titles like “Turkey Time,” a watercolor zine devoted to memorable turkeys she’s known; “The Sneeze that Saved My Life”; and “Little Bee, You’re Harassing Me,” a collaborative zine made with her daughter.
Alongside these faculty creations, zine-centered activities have been flourishing in SCW courses and across campus. T Hetzel continues to teach classes devoted entirely to zine-making, and many sections of Writing 160: Multimodal Composition incorporate zine projects. In October, Shelley Manis led an interactive workshop, “An Evening of Zine Creation,” through the Institute for the Humanities. Cat Cassel offered collage workshops in tandem with UMMA’s zine con, celebrating La Raza Arts and Media Collective, 1975–today. The past year has also seen a series of mini-zine cons organized with campus collaborators, including Mariya Zilberman in English and Erica Ervins from the Shapiro Design Lab.
These varied faculty and community interests culminated in the first annual Zine Jamboree, held March 29, 2025, at the Ypsilanti Freighthouse. The event brought together a robust lineup of vendors from across Michigan and even as far away as Chicago, with over 60 vendors in total. After such a successful debut, the second annual Zine Jamboree is already on the books for March 28, 2026, from noon to 3 p.m., again at the Freighthouse. See you there!
