8-Ball Almanac

Contributed to 8-Ball in a variety of capacities over the years, focusing on the original zine fairs and the Newsstand, an artist-run art book and zine store in the NYC Subway.

Text courtesy of 8-Ball;

8-Ball Almanac is a collectively told oral history of 8-Ball Community, an organization of people who seek to nurture a community of art through the creation and maintenance of free and accessible platforms of expression. 8-Ball Almanac acts as both a retrospective of the decade since the community’s accidental conception in a Brooklyn pool hall in 2012 and a guidebook for those who wish to cultivate a community like this one.

In the years since the first 8-Ball Zine Fair, the 8-Ball Community has grown beyond anything the founders had conceived of in 2012. Its scope broadened from organizing events and selling zines to archiving the physical evidence of the subculture they represented, broadcasting radio and television, and political activism. In keeping with 8-Ball Community’s tenets of collectivism and non-hierarchy, the story told in 8-Ball Almanac is from the perspective of more than 100 people who have been involved over the past decade. Interviewed about their time with 8-Ball and edited by members of the community, their conversations are accompanied by hundreds of photos and scans of ephemera taken over 8-Ball’s history.

The book is split into two parts, with the first half consisting of a majority of the text in the book, contains histories of each space 8-Ball inhabited in its decade of moving around New York as well as descriptions of each 8-Ball “team”: the events team, the library team, the publishing team, the radio team, the TV team, and the team responsible for activism and community outreach. The second half is a visual journey acting as a visual counterpart to the first half through a selection of photos, scans, and documents collected over ten years.

2023, 360 pages