The University of Georgia’s special collections library, which is housed at the Richard B. Russell Building on the University’s campus, looks like a mausoleum. Sleek marble floors and grand rotunda give way to a series of museum exhibits showcasing the special artifacts housed in the library.
Writer, photographer and creative Stacey Piotrowski spends her days here cataloging records of all of the collection’s books, magazines, periodicals and private press materials. She looks the part of a bookish librarian. She’s fair-skinned, bespectacled, and has her hair pulled back into a sensible ponytail.
When she reaches into her agenda to splay some of the recent zines she’s created across the table, though, her full sleeves of arm tattoos come into view, and her Ouija board planchette necklace dangles across the front of her hoodie. Piotrowski is a punk through and through.
One of Piotrowski’s areas of interest is zines, and she has helped catalog a wide collection of them held at the special collections library, made anywhere from the 1940s to the present day. They focus on a spectrum of topics just as wide.
Inquisitive minds can find works on everything from sci-fi fan fiction to queer kink to 90s punk, and Piotrowski, more than perhaps anyone in the building, understands the impact zines have had on American culture over the past several years.
Born in Pittsburgh, Piotrowski first started making zines as a teenager in the early 2000s. She and her best friend thought they had invented the art form. The two wanted to start an alternative school magazine that was more representative of their countercultural interests, which they didn’t see reflected at all in the media available to them.
Eventually, Piotrowski learned that, no, she hadn’t invented the zine. However, the simple discovery that there were other people like her in the world, other people who were also screaming into the void, hoping someone would understand them, inspired her lifelong dedication to the craft.
Inspired by punk philosophy and the DIY movement, Piotrowski has been creating zines for 25 years and collaborating with others in the zine community to build an underground media ecosystem dedicated to their specific, countercultural interests.
“I was a very angsty teen,” she said.
But zines provided a place for me to grow and get a lot of those angry feelings out, so that they, you know, didn’t contaminate my soul.”
Now, Piotrowski hopes to provide a collaborative space for today’s generation of young people to learn about the art form of zines and all the possibilities they contain.
And today’s young people are realizing those possibilities rapidly.
Gen-Z Yearns for Analog
In September 2025, a group of Gen-Z neoluddites, Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and the Passionate Hemorrhaging of Our Neo-Liberal Experience (a.k.a. S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E), held a rally in Manhattan. Donning colorful gnome hats, the SHITPHONEers gathered to hear impassioned speeches on the dangers of exploitative tech, write chalk messages disparaging Elon Musk and smash smartphones on the sidewalk. They’re whimsical but furious, and believe that infinite scrolling, 24-hour news notifications, and addictive apps like Tinder and DraftKings are destroying their attention spans, alienating them from reality and subsequently ruining their lives.
More and more, the first generation born completely into the digital world is becoming disillusioned with the utopic future the early tech pioneers promised.
Sam Munson is a 26-year-old wildland firefighter and zine maker and said they have always been more interested in older ways of doing things. They take a lot of film photography and have always been attracted to screenless forms of labor, like firefighting, trail work and baking.
I like older things and things that don’t involve too much technology, not because I’m not good at it, but I just find it more interesting. More effort goes into it,” they said.
Munson made their first contribution to a zine while working on an all-ladies trail crew in Oregon one summer. Initially, Munson felt like everyone in the group had an artistic “thing” but them. One woman made zines. Another was a talented block-printer. After bonding in the brutal and absurd conditions that AmeriCorps members regularly endure in the wild, the group decided they would produce a collaborative zine to commemorate their shared experience. Munson ended up contributing two haikus to the project and said that experience was their formal introduction into the zine community.
Now, as a wildland firefighter, Munson regularly travels across the country for weeks at a time. Though currently based in Colorado, Munson has lived a nomadic life since graduating from college with a degree in wilderness leadership and education, cobbling together a modest income from seasonal work tending the land for the U.S. government.
The first thing they do when they visit a new town is to scour the local bookstores and record shops for zines. Unlike a local newspaper or magazine, Munson believes zines are a better way to connect with the underground punk and queer scene in an area and to make connections with like-minded folks.
They discovered the zine that inspired them to make their own zines while visiting Dudley’s, an indie bookshop in Bend, Oregon. The zine was created by a trail crew worker and featured thoughts on their line of work, doodles, and letters sent to and received from friends.
Munson bought the zine and showed it off to all their friends, saying, “Don’t you feel the same! Like, come on, guys!”
They always kept journals, collected little artifacts from their travels and made silly doodles, but seeing the zine in Dudley’s that resonated with them so much was what lit their creative spark.
Munson has since made a series of zines inspired by their travels and stints of seasonal work and was surprised to find they had a creative muscle buried somewhere deep inside after all.
“I’ve never really thought of myself as an artist, but I do like to write and [my zine] was fun to put together,” Munson said.
So, I was like, oh, maybe I am some kind of artist. Is this art? Well, I mean, yeah. I’d say so.”
Though Piotrowski had always aspired to be a writer, she had a similar revelation when she started collecting and making zines. Collaborating with her high school and college friends, obsessing over music they liked and friends’ art they wanted to share was a formative part of her adolescent experience.
Additionally, Piotrowski saw zines as a more accessible way to put her art into the world as a working-class person. She never had much money to purchase art supplies or more professional types of counterculture publications. But zines, she believes, are a way to express a more genuine, pure form of artistic expression outside of the traditional art and publishing worlds.
Especially today in the era of social media and AI, Piotrowski thinks zines have real staying power in underground communities.
“Zines get back to the root of, like, what is writing for? What is art for? What are we trying to do? Are we trying to make a product that we can sell to people and profit off of, or are we trying to express ourselves and community and make a connection with somebody else?”
At its core, for many, zine culture is one of the last few anticapitalist forms of sharing information and artistic expression.
Esme Joy is a co-owner and cooperative member at Firestorm Books in Asheville, North Carolina, and they have helped curate the shop’s expansive zine collection.
Joy explained that zine culture is baked into the culture at large at Firestorm. The store sells zines on everything from radical politics to bird watching. Many of the shop’s employees themselves are zine makers. With every online order, shop workers enclose radical stickers or zines. Every month, the staff gets together for brunch to discuss a topic of interest, many of which are discussions based on zines. The shop has a free table with a large selection of zines that contain information pertinent to the shop’s mission. And every month, the shop holds a zine-folding party where community members can come and socialize, and the shop can, in turn, reduce the costs of its zine-spreading agenda.
Firestorm, an employee-owned, nonprofit, non-hierarchical collective, bases its practices on the Infoshop model, which began as community spaces where people could engage in radical, anarchist thought.
Since 2008, it’s been a part of the bedrock of radical organizing in western North Carolina, and with the rise of fascism in the United States, Joy believes the zine movement has an important role to play in today’s political moment.
At the No Kings march in June 2025, Firestorm employees saw an opportunity to tap into the growing number of people who are feeling frustrated with the state of the world and desperate to plug in.
The ethos was, Joy says, if y’all are fired up, here’s a zine that has local projects you can get involved in, or here’s a zine about why you might want to rethink the kind of internal policing that can often happen at protests that paint some protesters as the “good kind” while others are supposed outside agitators.
Being able to distribute that information is sort of the perfect way of meeting people where they’re at, where they’re literally there to plug in and learn, and you’re able to hand them something where they can do it right away,” they said.
Another benefit of making these connections in the community is somewhat PR related. For example, Joy pointed to the Trump administration’s increasing attempts to characterize people with radical politics as domestic terrorists. When the domestic terrorist is a friendly face passing out free pamphlets or helping run one of the largest mutual-aid centers in the state in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, it is a lot harder to hate them.
Both Piotrowski and Munson share much of Joy’s radical, anticapitalist, antifascist beliefs, and have found, through the zine community, a space where they can share and consume political thought free from censorship and the kind of online trolling that fills inboxes with death threats or lands one on the Canary Mission’s website.
Additionally, with the rise of AI, proponents of zine culture have more incentive than ever to fight for more analog, human forms of expression.
“I think that it’ll stick around, especially as AI becomes more prevalent and people get more fucking annoyed with it and distrustful,” Munson said. “People want to get back to live art. Like, AI can’t make puppets. It probably can’t make a zine.”
Piotrowski has been a part of zine culture since before email. As a kid, she said she would send a letter with a couple of dollars enclosed, trying to purchase zines, and just had to hope the address was correct and that the artist was still printing and that they would be kind enough to send back a zine in return.
Having witnessed a technological revolution throughout her formative years, she feels confident in her belief that the internet and its constantly evolving iterations will never destroy zines.
If anything, online communities have helped spread zine culture to wider audiences, making zines more popular than ever, she said.
At her zine-making workshops, Piotrowski notices participants are there for all kinds of different reasons. Some just want to socialize and craft. Some want to sit in silence and work diligently on their projects. Some focus on fashion, while others focus on comic books. The point is, Piotrowski says, the art form is accessible to everyone, and everyone can benefit from creative expression.
Piotrowski herself has long used zines to process complex and difficult moments from her past. Though she has always been a prolific journaler, she said there is something about the process of organizing her thoughts into a coherent story and sending it out into the world that is cathartic.
She first started taking her zine-making more seriously after experiencing an incredibly traumatic event in her early 20s.
At 21, Piotrowski experienced an unplanned pregnancy and relinquished her daughter to adoption. While all her friends were drinking and partying, she was dealing with this life-altering event that made her have to grow up fast. It was alienating, but it also became the event that catalyzed her desire to share more personal and vulnerable work with the world. She didn’t know how to deal with her emotions, but through zine making, she was able to process a lot of the trauma from that event.
“It’s just a way to convert the mess that I feel inside emotionally into something that makes sense to someone else who might be able to relate to it,” she said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s never going to upset me again, but it means, OK, I’ve made sense of this a little bit, and it can go out into the world and maybe not be so heavy in me anymore.”
That kind of compulsion to create has also had a positive impact on Munson’s life, especially given the low barrier of entry inherent to zine-making. Slowly, they’ve realized that by sharing their art, however low-budget and shoddy they may think it is, the experience of having people receive it and saying it affected them is worth any doubt they have to fight through to make the final product.
“Getting involved with the creative process, there’s so much pressure to create something good or create something that people will buy, just commodifying your hobby,” they said. “And it’s really cool because I never considered myself someone who is artistic, but just being surrounded by people who want to make things just because they like it makes me inspired to try things out myself.”
Alex Perri is a graduate student in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.
