Please join the ACRL Arts Conference Programming Committee on Monday, April 28, 2025, from 3pm-4:30pm EST for an engaging panel discussion featuring five experienced librarians as they share their expertise on implementing, organizing, and maximizing the impact of comics, graphic novels, and zines in academic, public, and specialized library settings.
This panel will cover successful practices in zine collection development and programming, graphic medicine for mental health support, reader’s advisory training for comics and manga, running zine libraries with student interns, and using comics' structural elements to enhance accessibility in library instruction.
Panelists will cover topics such as collection development, programming, organizing zine festivals, integrating comics into the classroom, and innovative pedagogical approaches across academic, public, and school library settings.
This session offers valuable takeaways for librarians at all career stages interested in visual storytelling formats and their applications across library environments and diverse patron populations.
Please register for this event at this link. Have questions please contact Megan Lotts at megan.lotts@rutgers.edu.
Order of speakers and bios below:
Laural Winter, currently works at Multnomah County Library as a Staff training librarian and HR analyst. She is also one of the virtual personalized services librarians called the My Librarians. She has presented on various training topics at multiple Oregon Library Association Conferences, Public Library Association Conferences, Rose City Comic Con and the Portland Zine Symposium.
Soline Holmes is a librarian and the Information Services Department Chair at Academy of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is the Secretary for the American Library Association's Graphic Novels and Comics Roundtable, co-chair of Association for Library Service to Children's "Children and Libraries" Editorial Advisory Committee, a member of ALSC's Public Awareness and Advocacy committee, and is co-chair of the 2026 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award Nominating Committee for USBBY. She has given presentations on graphic novels at local and national conferences, and she contributed a chapter about graphic novels and mental health to ALA's recently published book "Mental Health and Children's Literature: Evaluating, Curating, and Sharing Books with Children."
A’misa Chiu (she/they) is a zine maker, artist and community organizer, who is currently the zine librarian at Reed Zine Library at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, practicing community-centered outreach and engagement, and publishing scholarship on zines as tools of empowerment and cultural identity.
Mary Ruge is a Liberal Arts Liaison Librarian at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. She has worked in both academic and public libraries for over 13 years, and has created comics programming for a variety of audiences since 2015. Much of their scholarship focuses on the comics form and how to apply it in ways that increase accessibility and inclusion.
Jenna Freedman (she/her) is the founder and Director of the Barnard Zine Library. She's also an active zine maker and writes and presents on zines when she can. Here's a link to her presentation.
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