We’ve been getting so many rad zines, we decided to call in the reinforcements. So, for the first time ever, we are pleased to announce that the BP Zine Awards will have not three, but four judges reading entries! This will allow us to get more eyes on every entry and bring more critical eyes to the task. Oh! In case you hadn’t heard, the BP Zine Awards 2020 entry deadline has been… EXTENDED UNTIL TOMORROW NIGHT JULY 15 AT 11:59PM!
So go ahed and enter your zine on submittable, all of the the instructions can be found here. Right, so! In addition to last year’s Zine of the Year champ Billy Mccall and comics hero Michael DeForge, we are so stoked to have the manager of Quimby’s, the greatest zine-centric shop in the world — that’s right, zine impresario Liz Mason! Check out the chat she had with BP editor Jonathan Valelly about all things zine awards and many other things goofy. And definitely look for reviews of her recent zines, Caboose #12 and Awesome Things #3 in the Summer issue of Broken Pencil.
Liz Mason has been self-publishing for 20 years. Her work has also been printed in such publications as Punk Planet and The Zine Yearbook. She appeared on the reality show Starting Over to provide instruction on publishing zines, which NBC executives referred to as “pamphlets,” as if they were Marxist propaganda. Her 1987 membership number from SHADES The Official Corey Hart Fan Club was #13881.
Knowing that we had more zines in almost every category of entry before, we decided to pull in somebody else with the insight and experience to look at a range of entries and genres. Who better but Hamilton-based zine artist, curator, performer and organizer Sonali Menezes of Glittering Magpiee!
Sonali Menezes utilizes performance, video, sculpture, printmaking, poetry and sometimes-exorbitant amounts of Manwich tomato sauce. Her work reflects her resistance to the histories of colonialism and racialization within which she is interwoven. Whether breaking social codes by harvesting lavender in public spaces, documenting patterns of white men on the mobile dating app tinder or reuniting her eyebrows through patient cultivation, she employs the age-old strategies of the horticulturalist and anthropologist to live and produce in perpetual, unapologetic confrontation to power.
Menezes was also the winner of the Litzine of the Year 2018 for her work Back and Forth (a negotiation), which was her first ever literary publication. Here’s an excerpt from the zine:
