Celia C. Peréz on Creating the Zines She Couldn’t Find in the 90s

Each week on NewberyTart, Jennie and Marcy, two book-loving mamas (and a librarian and a bookseller, respectively), read and drink their way through the entire catalogue of Newbery books, and interview authors and illustrators along the way.

On this episode, Jennie and Marcy talk to Celia C. Peréz, author of the award-winning book The First Rule of Punk. 

From the episode:

Celia: As someone who was into punk but not necessarily interested in playing music, I saw them as a way to to create something within that scene. And so that’s how I started making zines back in the 90s. My zines have always been personal zines, which is what Malú’s character makes in The First Rule of Punk. There are all kinds of genres of zines. There’s poetry zines, there’s recipe zines, there’s comic zines, and there are personal zines, where people write about their own experiences and their own lives and things that are happening in their worlds. And I didn’t see a lot of zines by other people of color, which was something that I was always seeking out. And so I started making zines where I wrote about my family and my upbringing and my culture and music and whatever was happening in my life.

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Celia C. Pérez is the award-winning author of The First Rule of Punk, a 2018 Pura Belpré Author Honor Book. Celia is a longtime maker of zines inspired by her love of punk music and writing. Her favorite zine supplies are a long-arm stapler, glue sticks, and watercolor pencils. She’ll never stop picking cilantro out of her food at restaurants, and she owns two sets of worry dolls because you can never have too many. Originally from Miami, Florida, Celia lives in Chicago with her family where she works as a community college librarian.