We’re a collective of zinesters, writers, artists, activists, and zine-enthusiasts working to build a DIY community in Kansas City.

Zines are self-published DIY publications, typically made using a copy machine. Founded in 2014 by the Kansas City Zine Collective, Kansas City Zine Con is a one-day convention/festival held annually in Midtown Kansas City, Missouri, where participants exhibit, sell, and trade their independently published zines, comix, books, newspapers, anthologies, tracts, pamphlets, and DIY radical readables of many forms. Since 2015, we’ve been hosting some of the midwest’s coolest zinesters at our annual convention.

We acknowledge that our festival inhabits land stolen from the Kansa, Osage, and Shawnee Nations — the traditional guardians of the land on which we live — and that our nation was built on a legacy of chattel slavery — the brutal enslavement of Black people, whose exploited labor created this nation’s wealth. We feel it is important to assert that Black Lives Matter.

At KC Zine Con, anyone can come and wander the tables, chat with the incredible artists, learn at workshops and panels, make a whole host of new friends, and get tons of zines! In addition to the annual festival, KCZC facilitates writing, collage, and zine-making workshops in the community and has partnered with organizations such as the Kansas City Public Library, Girl Scouts, Imagine That!, and the Johnson County Public Library. As an entirely volunteer-run organization, KCZC exists to build and foster a DIY community of zine-makers and uplift underrepresented voices in our community. The majority of our tablers and organizers are LGBTQIA or queer, and we are driven by a vision of creating KCZC as a safer space for our community and people.

“The vibe was just right: more than a thousand friendly weirdos gathered to peruse chapbooks, comics, tote bags, screen prints, T-shirts, buttons, pottery, poetry collections, and old-school zines made of photocopied and stapled pages. To attend Zine Con is to feel a part of a beautiful artistic community beginning to break through.” – The Pitch “Best of Kansas City” 2017

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Mission + Vision

Mission: KC Zine Con is a volunteer-run collective creating safer spaces in Kansas City for people to connect with the DIY ethos and values inherent in zine-making. We empower individuals as auteurs in the self-published medium through the prioritization of underrepresented voices, and the facilitation and planning of an annual zine fest, workshops, and readings.

Vision: A diverse community of zine-makers and -readers will be sustained through collaboration, DIY ethics and creative opportunities, while creating a new standard for safer spaces in KC.

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Organizing

KC Zine Con is an entirely volunteer-run organization. We all help out to create KCZC because we’re passionate about zines and building a DIY (do-it-yourself) and DIT (do-it-together) community in KC.

Want to get involved? We’re always looking for more Organizers! Organizers volunteer to meet 2 – 3 times a month to plan the fest, and we all do a little bit of everything: from planning the table layouts, to graphic design, to social media marketing; from contacting vendors and out-of-state tablers, to training day-of volunteers, performing secretarial work, or schlepping around boxes of zine-making supplies… it’s a ton of hard, fun, gratifying work that’s all worth it come fest day. Currently, we meet virtually over Zoom and are working on planning KCZC #8.

If being an Organizer sounds like too big of a commitment, we’re also always looking for Volunteers. Volunteers are called on to help with specific projects, such as working the front table at events, or passing out flyers.

Interested in learning more about volunteering and organizing? Drop us a line!

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