Malana Krongelb zine collection (MS.2017.007)

Biographical / Historical

The following passage is written by Malana Krongelb Brown University class of 2019 and the Pembroke Center's student curator of the Malana Krongelb zine collection.

Zines and zine collections uplift personal narratives, often allowing people who would otherwise be excluded from mainstream publication to make their voices heard. Because of this, and my unique position as student curator, archivist, and zinester, I am choosing to write the biographical note for this collection in the first person.

I was born January 5th, 1995 in Poughkeepsie, New York. I have a mixed ethnic, racial (Black/white, or African American/Eastern European Jewish), religious, and class background. I matriculated into Brown in fall 2013 and my time at Brown has allowed me to grow into celebrating various parts of my identity. However, the transition to Brown as a disabled, queer woman of color was difficult. During my second semester on campus, a graduate student sexually harassed me, and the gendered, racialized, and ableist dynamics of which left me feeling silenced. Amidst a backdrop of protests against former New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly, a failed movement to get Brown to divest from the coal industry, and massive Title IX investigations, my first year at Brown left me riddled with anxiety and a desire to be heard.

It wasn't until I helped create a zine entitled silence + voice with the on-campus feminist publication bluestockings magazine that I finally felt that I had a voice. Before this project I had never heard of a zine, but their transformative power immediately pervaded my consciousness. The following semester, I handed a copy of silence + voice to Brown University President Christina Paxson at a Sexual Assault Task Force open forum.

In November 2014, I sustained a serious concussion, just a short time after the Sexual Assault Task Force meeting. During my subsequent year-long leave from Brown I once again needed a way to express myself. For one of the classes I needed to finish, I pitched a grant application to start a zine collection at the Sarah Doyle Women's Center. I wanted a way to heal not only the multiple traumas I had experienced, but also to provide a way for people to communally heal, learn, and express themselves. Hearing about the successes and pain around Brown student organizing for Indigenous People's Day and the first reading of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow only crystallized my desire to make the zine collection happen.

Coming back after a year to a place that felt both familiar and foreign, I felt especially devastated when Brown's Creative Arts Council denied my grant application. Distressed but not deterred, I applied again. This one was accepted. So was the next grant application, and the next one, and the one after that. In 2016, I began building the collection, and I was thrilled.

Shortly thereafter, students, classes, and Providence community members started to use the collection. People told me they had never seen themselves represented before they read particular zines; that reading the zines helped with their depression; or that a zine completely changed their perspective. Students started donating zines they had made for classes that were inspired by the collection.

On February 1st, 2017, the collection officially launched with a series of events including a queer zine workshop hosted by Barnard Library's Jenna Freedman. It was at the zine open house that I met Mary Murphy, the Nancy L. Buc '65 Pembroke Center Archivist. We discussed starting a partner archival collection to address the fact that many of the zines -- particularly zines by people of color -- and the histories contained within are rapidly disappearing. The current iteration of the zine collection combines communal accessibility with long-term preservation. While I realize there are gaps in the collection, I hope the collection embraces diversity and transformation. The space provided shows that the voices in the collection are legitimate within the academy, and also that these voices were never illegitimate to begin with.