Booklyn, Inc.

We're building a world of self-determined narratives through book & zine-making education.

Booklyn, Inc. is all about making bookmaking, zine-making, and self-publishing accessible to historically marginalized communities, delivered from a non-specialist (“DIY") approach. We support communities hit hard by the lasting impacts of the worldwide pandemic. Young people, immigrants, and the LGBTQIA+ community, among others. Our program also provides work for teaching artists who continue to rebuild their futures after the devastating financial blows of the pandemic. Our goal: To build a world of self-determined narratives, where hands-on bookmaking skills are used to affirm communities from within and to better understand the world around us.

With your support, we brought you the free downloadable Booklyn Education Manual–six binding techniques and 20 lesson plans, available in both English & Spanish. We created a series of bookmaking video tutorials. Now, you can download a newly re-designed abridged manual, formatted as a print-ready booklet. All are free to access online.

But there’s more you’ve helped us do!

In 2023 we brought eight zine workshops to Mixteca Organization, and four Zine Jam workshops to NYC public parks to make bookmaking a publicly accessible skill. We continued our partnership with Brooklyn Community Pride Center with Zine-making for Personal & Community Storytelling, an official 2023 Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event. Finally, we partnered with Public Art Fund to bring three zine workshops to Sunset Park. All 16 workshops were free for participants.

Also in 2023 we focused our commitment to young people with Zine Camp and Zines After School programming for kids in grades 2-5, and did several onsite workshops at public elementary and middle schools. We worked with Emma Karin Eriksson and Kameelah Janan Rasheed to create an original curriculum specifically for these programs. We added Zines 101 for adults and Zines for Educators, a three-day professional development workshop for teachers wanting to integrate zine-making in the classroom.

Lastly, our beloved podcast, Booklyn Calling, brings you voices from the artist book field and explores artmaking as a tool for community engagement and social change.

An important note about how we do what we do: we support teaching artists by paying them a living wage, using the Teaching Artist Guild’s pay calculator. That means Booklyn teaching artists are paid between $50-$125 per hour. Always. We make this a priority in order to stabilize and strengthen the work teaching artists do in our community.

You can make a difference by donating today to Booklyn, Inc.

Founded in 1999, Booklyn is an artist-run, non-profit 501 (c) (3), consensus-governed, artists and bookmakers organization headquartered at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.