Say Hello to Our 2021 Zine Awards Judges!

A big welcome to our 2021 BP Zine Awards Judges, Fiona Smyth and Katie Salisbury! So excited to have these lovely people judging your zines! 

Katie Salisbury

I’m Katie, a storyteller based in Brooklyn. I’m a writer, editor, and photographer whose work has appeared in The Ringer, Marie Claire, VICERefinery29Roads & Kingdoms, On Being, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and elsewhere. I’m currently at work on a book about Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star, for Dutton Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. In conjunction with the book, I write a free monthly newsletter that explores topics related to Anna May Wong, race in America, representation in Hollywood, and other interesting nuggets of forgotten history. Subscribe here to receive future issues, which are sent the first Sunday of every month.

Most recently, I was a 2021 finalist for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship program. As a Spring 2017 TED Resident, I gave a TED Talk titled As American as Chop Suey about my photojournalism project on Chinese restaurant workers in New York. The photos and stories of these workers are collected in the exhibition Thank You Enjoy, which began touring the US in 2018.

In 2016, I contributed to the documentary project She Is Syria, which chronicles the stories of women and girl refugees. Previously, I edited award-winning books for Amazon Publishing and HarperCollins. I relaunched Book of the Month as a box subscription service for books in 2015. I also co-founded and served as editor in chief of William & Park, a digital magazine for creatives. 

A California transplant, I suffer from chronic wanderlust and an inexplicable need to collect cute things that don’t fit in my apartment. I’m half Anglo-Irish, half Chinese, and a 5th-generation Chinese American. In another life I wrote about Chinatown, a place I used to live. 

Drop me a line at [email protected]

Fiona Smyth

Toronto feminist painter/illustrator/cartoonist/educator Fiona Smyth (she/her) collaborated with sex educator Cory Silverberg on the kids’ books “What Makes A Baby” and “Sex Is A Funny Word” (Seven Stories Press), 2016 ALA Stonewall Book Award Honor book and 2016 Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction winner. They are currently working on the third in the series titled “You Know, Sex”.

Fiona’s comics appear in Francoise Mouly and Nadja Spiegelman’s Resist #1 and 2, a thirty-year collection of her comics “Somnambulance” published by Koyama Press, 4Panel 2 edited by Mark Laliberte, and the anthology “Theater of Terror Revenge of the Queers” with Mariko Tamaki edited by Justin Hall and William O.Tyler. Fiona was inducted into the Doug Wright Awards’ Giants Of The North Canadian Cartoonist Hall Of Fame alongside Alootook Ipellie in 2019.
 
She teaches cartooning at OCAD U.