Print Never Left: Black Writers on Archiving and Self-Published Print Media

by Dr. Ravynn Stringfield

Social media is currently flooded with messages from people encouraging others online to “get into print media” or “go analog,” while simultaneously bemoaning the loss of politically aware print media that centered marginalized voices—RIP Bitch Media—and a dearth of media that represent our experiences. However, for Black artists, writers and activists, physical archiving practices and small, independently run and distributed printed publications have never left. Simply, an increasingly volatile political climate and shifts in the independent media landscape over the last decade have made audiences want more: more context about what is going on in the United States and abroad, more information about how to protect ourselves and others, and more ways to connect deeply with others and nurture community, when a goal is to drive us apart. 

The good news? There is a strong historical precedent for the type of connectivity we’re seeking in the Black American intellectual and artistic tradition. We have existing models for how to lean in.

FIRE!!, for example, was a 1926 magazine by writers and thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance, known then by its artists as The New Negro Movement. Despite only publishing one issue, this precursor to the modern zine was the result of many gatherings at the home of novelist Wallace Thurman, which it is said anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston dubbed “Niggerati Manor.” Thurman had his hands in many creative pots, working as a screenwriter, editor for newspapers and publishing novels, including a satirical rendering of the artistic personalities surrounding him in Infants of the Spring (1932), also inspired by those gatherings. 

FIRE!! was an attempt to create a publication that carved out more free space for expression than what Black writers were allotted in mainstream publishing. One issue was enough of a spark: opening the door for the first outlines of an independent Black publishing tradition. Generations of Black creators followed, gathering and creating small, experimental publications. One hundred years after FIRE!!, we have Black Fire—This Time: An Anthology (2023), a collected edition inspired by the work of one of the architects of the New Negro Movement, Alain Locke, and FIYAH: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, a Hugo Award winning quarterly magazine that shows us what can happen if we dare to ask, “What if?”

RELATED: We are in a queer media movement, but is increased visibility the answer to violence?

A little more than fifty years after FIRE!!, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press became the first publishing house for women of color in the United States with a large audience under the leadership of writers and activists like Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Cherrie Moraga and Audre Lorde. In a similar fashion, Kitchen Table Press began as conversations in gatherings of like minded individuals, starting with a conversation between Smith and Lorde, and grew into a commitment to amplifying the voices of people often pushed to the margin of mainstream publishing. Some of our most beloved feminist texts were originally published from Kitchen Table Press, like Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and the Combahee River Collective Statement from their pamphlet series. The statement, another publication in the zine family, comes from the Combahee River Collective, an organization of Black lesbians in 1970s Boston who mobilized around political consciousness raising on issues facing a diverse array of women, is one of the places we turn to for early writing on identity politics and experiencing interlocking systems of oppressions, theorization that Kimberlé Crenshaw later builds upon to coin the term “intersectionality.” 

Today, Black women writers gatherings and publications are equally vibrant. Midnight & indigo,  headed by Ianna A. Small, has been publishing fiction and essays by Black women writers from across the globe in both physical and digital editions since 2018. Jacquie Verbal’s recent Blackstack magazine has turned from a digital publication to a physical one they source in house, with opportunities for writing folks to gather together online. For twenty years, TORCH Literary Arts has committed to publishing work by Black women writers across the diaspora in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and scripts. 

Comics and visual art also have a special place in this ecosystem, in addition to publications that center wordsmithing. During the Civil Rights Movement, the comic Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story was an accessible way to inform citizens about the nonviolent protests, as it was distributed widely amongst communities. The spirit of communal artmaking, both for political education and connection, continues today. Activists like Mariame Kaba and her collaborators, such as Kelly Hayes, often use both digital and physical zines to share information about organizing and abolition movement work. Black Zinesters, who you can find all across the internet, some independent bookshops, comic bookstores, and at your local zine festival (yes, I am confident there is probably one close to you), would love for you to buy their zines. 

RELATED: What does “home” mean for Black folks when white violence can so easily invade our dwellings?

Part of the reason we are able to point to these legacies today is because people knew to archive these creative works. Someone knew that we would one day need a record of how we lived, how we made it through, and they preserved it. You don’t need to be a Harlem Renaissance or Black Arts Movement icon to archive; you just need to put it down. 

We need the records of what information and art was shared amongst our circles, but we also need day-to-day records. We will need to know what the price of eggs and gas was today in your city. We will need to know who won school board elections and what the original headline of an article was. We will need to know how you all built community with each other, and we will need to be able to hold it in our hands. I am someone who knows the benefit of using the internet as a tool for connection and community building; I don’t know that I will ever totally abandon digital record keeping and sharing. The infrastructure of the digital is tenuous; so is journaling and other types of physical memory keeping. We need them both. We need records with information that’s harder to manipulate, falsify or disappear. We need all the archives we can get.

Your grandmother who kept a Bible with the family tree as far back as she could remember? She was an archivist. The uncle who tells you so many stories you aren’t sure how they all fit in his head? He is an archivist. Your cousin who keeps all of the photo albums? Archivist. They never asked any university or institution to call it that; their way of life is memory keeping. And now we are the memory keepers.

We know from the work of scholars like Dr. Dana A. Williams, who documented Toni Morrison’s work as an editor in Toni At Random (2025), that the American traditional publishing industry goes through cycles of accepting more people of color that correspond directly with political movements in the United States. When the moment dies down, the entry point for new Black writers constricts, and leaves audiences wanting more. But those are the moments when, deprived of output from traditional avenues, that audiences realize that the writers never left. Audiences realize that Black artists are going to make art, no matter if it gets large scale distribution and huge-marketing budgets—we are just looking in the wrong places. Enter small scale publications. Enter archiving. Some of the most changemaking actions we can do are to gather together, record and share information. We, Black artists, Black writers, Black folks who live, were always going to find ways to practice our self-determination and agency, to prove that we were here, and we have loved through it all.

Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield is a writer, editor, artist and former Peanut Fest Queen from Suffolk, Virginia. She is the author of two novels for young adults, Love in 280 Characters or Less (Feiwel & Friends, 2025) and Love Requires Chocolate (Joy Revolution, 2024). She is a product of Virginia public schools (Suffolk Public Schools) and universities (University of Virginia), all the way up to her PhD in American Studies from William & Mary. Stringfield has been published in a variety of venues for the last six years—book collections, magazines, scholarly journals—but most importantly, she is a lifelong reader and a maker of beautiful things.