ms. adams if you’re nasty

ciara xyerra has been writing zines for the better part of two decades. she started as a young teenager, when she wrote ludicrously long zines about her vaguely-formed neophyte feminist observations & hilarious family antics. she is amazed & disturbed to still be in contact with some of the folks who suffered through that dark period. after taking a zine hiatus, organizing the first bowling green zine conference in 1999, & moving to portland, oregon, she launched a far superior zine called “a renegade’s handbook to love & sabotage”. it was also absurdly long & ran for five issues, recounting her adventures in feminist collectives, helping unionize powell’s books, dating schmoes, mental & reproductive health, & discovering anarcha-feminism.

ciara moved to boston in the summer of 2001. another zine hiatus ensued while she attended midwifery school, learned menstrual extraction, started the long-running boston skillshare collective/conference, dabbled in zine libraries & anarchist bookstores, & started her zine distro, learning to leave a paper trail. while doing a zinester residency in a shed in halifax, she launched her two current zine projects: “up the logic punks!” (logic puzzles about zines, punks, & anarchists) & “love letters to monsters” (a personal zine about turning thirty, dead parents, collective organizing hijinks, & being a professional crabcakes).

she now lives in lawrence, kansas with her cat, charlotte, & her boyfriend, jared. she is a self-described “grad school widow” until some indeterminate time around 2015 when jared completes his doctorate & tethers himself to academia on the other side of desk. she enjoys baking sugary treats, young adult fiction from her childhood, keeping it cranky, intersectional post-third wave feminism, dinosaurs, & monsters. if you have nothing nice to say, she recommends that you come sit here by her, so you can say not-nice things together!

the seal of disapproval from ms. crabigail adams