Please join us Wednesday June 18th at 7pm for the launch of Freedom Zines.

During this interactive panel, attendees will be presented with a brief history of the Sea Island Citizenship schools and the Mississippi Freedom Summer schools, as well as a description of the Freedom Zines workshop. Attendees will also be asked to think about and discuss their early writing experiences by the panel moderator. Then, Freedom Zines participants will discuss and share their zine-making process, followed by a Q&A. Zines will also be distributed to all event attendees.

About:

Freedom Zines is a public writing project that asks participants to investigate their relationships with writing and, by extension, explore their social and political identities. This project explores how the writing workshop can function as a communal, mobile literacy site—and how it embodies the historically ambulatory nature of Black literacies in the mid-20th century American South. It also frames the writing workshop as a byproduct of historically significant mobile writing spaces. In the face of ChatGPT and other services that purport to write for us, this project proposes that now, more than ever, we should center the act of writing as a way to engage our social and political identities. The histories of Black literacy movements in the U.S. South serve as a guidepost for this project because they remind us that writing can be a responsive, community-oriented action.

Learn more about the project here

Hosted by Chy Sprauve

Chy Sprauve is a scholar in Composition-Rhetoric currently working as an Assistant Professor of Black, Race and Ethnic Studies in the English department at Queensborough Community College, CUNY.