

2025 Vendors
Artsy Annie
Annie Middleton (she/they) is a mixed media artist with interest in fiber arts, painting, drawing, and collage. Originally from Champaign, IL, they reside in Indianapolis, IN and graduated with a BFA in Painting from Herron in May 2025. They love to create work surrounding the act of growing up with both the pains and jubilance. Middleton's work captures visuals and sensations of growing up, reflecting on a timeless process with tenderness and compassion. Middleton reflects and digs into connection and intimacy that is lacking in our current world. While relatability is encouraged, the feeling and closeness that is exhibited in Middleton's works is the central drive forward. Stories create mutual understanding, her work aims to deconstruct and rebuild community through shared vulnerability.
Chroma Fantasy Series
Maya Gouliard is a late-blooming fantasy author who discovered her writing voice after raising four children. When empty nest syndrome left her feeling lost, Maya channeled her experiences into creating magical worlds where older women are the heroes, not just the mentors. Her debut novel Waterweaver launched the Chroma Fantasy series, featuring realms where color holds power and motherhood becomes strength. Maya's "cozy dystopian" fantasy offers emotional comfort while exploring themes of resilience and transformation. When not crafting stories filled with baby dragons and everyday magic, she creates handmade bookish items and hosts the Wise Woman's Fantasy Book Club. Maya's authentic storytelling resonates with readers who believe dreams don't have expiration dates.
Dane Georges
Dane Georges is a cartoonist and designer living in Evanston, IL, with his wife and cat. His self-published comics and zines—featuring oddball characters like Doom Skull, Fish & Chip, and Jiggly-Bub—blend humor, horror, and surrealism. In addition to making comics, Dane hosts Dangerous Comics, a YouTube channel where he reviews strange, forgotten, and underground books from the world of sequential art. Find more at danegeorges.com.
Eli Rayas
Eli Rayas is an animator/artist from Minnesota living in Chicago. He usually isn't satisfied with just one form of art, so he is usually found working simultaneously on zines & comics, animated short films, children's books, and digital painting. His work often comes from the need to process the difficulty of existing in the world, and attempts to inspire connection with viewers by putting those feelings into the context of stories, prose, and visual art.
Fantasy Art by Elaine C. Oldham
Hi, I’m Elaine the author/illustrator of A Tale of Winter, a fantasy short about a fairy family telling a fairy tale, Shadow Dance, A Dark Telling, a horror short about why we shouldn’t look too closely at what lurks in the shadows, and Minstrel Fair, my self-published comic. I am also the author of The Low Sodium Lifestyle health book series available on Amazon. As Fantasy Art by Elaine C. Oldham, I sell original drawings, prints, cards, and bookmarks of fairies, dragons, and other fantastical creatures, as well as custom art drawn onsite to order using photos or online images as models. Visit my website, www.dreamlightgraphics.com, to see galleries of my work, and purchase my books, art, and more.
Flatlands Press
Eric Von Haynes is an experienced printmaker and designer with over 15 years of experience leading Flatlands Press, an imprint known for its focus on innovative design and community-based projects. In addition to being President of the Chicago Printers Guild, he serves as an Instructor in Graphic Design at the UIC School of Design. He teaches offset production in the print media department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he shares his knowledge of design and print techniques, substrate knowledge, and documentation. His work, blending creative and analytical approaches, has been acquired by prominent collections, including the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection in Chicago, the Center for Book Arts in New York, and the Illinois State Museum. His work has been in exhibitions spanning esteemed venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and the Elephant Room Gallery. A committed community advocate, Eric cofounded The Love Fridge Chicago, a mutual aid initiative supporting community fridges throughout the city. His practice extends to collaborative projects and public workshops, reinforcing his commitment to skill-sharing and community engagement.
Grant Thomas
Grant Thomas is a cartoonist, book architect, printmaker, and educator. He works across comics, block prints, and handmade books, using each form to explore visual storytelling through sequence, rhythm, and structure. His comics range from abstract experiments to traditional narratives, all grounded in a love of process and the physicality of print media. Whether carving linoleum or folding paper into zines, he invites viewers to read images as much as see them. His work has appeared in Abstract Comics: The Anthology (Fantagraphics) and Visual Arts Research (University of Illinois Press). He teaches art in Illinois and continues to create work that reflects a deep engagement with craft and form.
Indie author Ekta R. Garg
A Reviewer, Editor, Author, and Dreamer of stories and books, Ekta has worked in niche publishing since 2005—she’s written and edited about everything from healthcare to home improvement to Hindi films! Ekta judges writing contests, hosts writing workshops, and podcasts about great books and how to write them. She’s currently the Content Coordinator of Neighbors of SW Champaign, a hyper-local magazine focusing on and lifting up the Champaign, Illinois, community. Ekta’s award-winning holiday novella, The Truth About Elves, and her award-winning fairy tale for grownups, In the Heart of the Linden Wood, are available from Atmosphere Press. Her newest release, The Witch’s Apprentice and Other Stories, releases in August 2025 from Atmosphere Press. Learn more about her at https://ektargarg.com or https://thewriteedge.wordpress.com.
Matthew David Crowther
Matthew David Crowther is a Chicago based photographer, designer, and bookmaker. His work uses personal, subjective experience to investigate relationships between humans, time, and our environment, challenge the duality of human vs nature, and explore cultural understandings of our place in the world.
Melon Press
Melon Press is an independent Risograph printer and publisher with a focus on curating magazines featuring artists from the Midwest. We have ongoing titles such as Froot Punch and Duplicator Magazine that are submission based zines. We offer publishing and printing services for individuals and collectives based out of Saint Louis, MO.
Nathan Pearce-Same Coin Press
Nathan Pearce (born 1986) is an artist based in Southern Illinois. Pearce works in book and zine making and photography. Pearce’s publications are held in several artists' book and library collections including those at MoMA, The Met, Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Center for Creative Photography. His work has been exhibited in solo shows at the PhotoNola festival, Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Nizhniy Tagil Museum of Fine Arts and The Rangefinder Gallery in Chicago. He has been published in over 200 books, zines and exhibition catalogs; as well as online in The Huffington Post, The British Journal of Photography, and Juxtapoz.
Prairie Rambler Press
Prairie Rambler Press is ran by Ryan Searl, a lens-based artist and photo zinemaker from Ottawa, Illinois. His work explores contemporary and underrepresented rural spaces across the midwest. His work has been featured in Immaterial Books' Fields of Vision show and in Pamplemousse magazine.
Ren S-K Studio
Ren [they/she] is an independent artist, designer and friend of birds. Their art practice is their reverence to all beings, to communicate that each of us are worthy of compassion and total liberation. Originally from downriver of Detroit, Michigan, they now reside in another rust belt city: Indianapolis. Their queerness centers their relationships to these resilient places and the other-than-humans often featured in their pieces, who provide them with unconditional refuge. Ren creates two zine series themed around nature and interconnectedness: Non-Human Neighbors and A More-Than-Human Society, as well as one-off poetry zines. All are limited-edition risograph prints on recycled papers.
Sarah Foley
Sarah Foley is an interdisciplinary artist from Arlington Heights, Illinois who has a passion for self-publishing! By intertwining fantastical elements with reality, they aim to create authentic and comforting visual narratives that explore human emotion and the importance of the natural world. Their work ranges in content but primarily tackles themes of mental health, identity, and nature.
Skeuomorph Press
Skeuomorph Press & BookLab is an experiential studio for teaching and researching the history and art of the book at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We are housed in the Champaign-Urbana Community FabLab and sponsored by the School of Information Sciences, with support from the Department of English. We also sponsor the Skeuomorphics club.
The BugMangaka
Kyle Robateau is an illustrator, animator, and comic artist with a passion for exploring sexuality, queerness, oppression, and the complexities of relationships throughout their work. Kyle currently resides in the Chicagoland area and is attending their fourth year at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s BFA program. They are known for their colorful cutesy art style and intricate panel layouts, and they run a business selling comics, stickers, prints, and more both online and in-person at events across the midwest.
UIUC Intro Printmakers
ARTS 205 Intro to Printmaking is a course regularly offered by the School of Art & Design at UIUC, and is currently in-progress this semester. Students in this course learn traditional and contemporary print processes including intaglio, relief, and screenprint, and incorporate these into the development of a personalized portfolio of creative work. Two sections of this class, one currently focusing on screenprinting and one currently focusing on relief printing, are represented here.
Uncanny Urbana
Uncanny Urbana is a collective of weird local writers.
Urbana High School Punk Club
Students participating from Urbana High School's Punk Club.
VENOMYTHS
VENOMYTHS is Joshua Ray Stephens’ ongoing anthology of cartoon future fantasy. Equal parts sci-fi, fantasy, philosophy, poetry, religious revelation and silly ass comics. Set in a far off future in a psychiatric asylum that everyone calls Magic Moon VENOMYTHS is a mind bending romp through the ravings of an over-active imagination and over-saturated mind.
Wild Ramp Publishing
Keidra Chaney is the founder of Wild Ramp Publishing, a Chicago-based micro-press dedicated to small-run zines and chapbooks about pop culture, fandom, disability, and social justice. I created this press to uplift marginalized voices and support community-driven storytelling, including offering micro-grants to disabled zinesters working at the intersection of art and activism. My zines (like Act Your Age: Fandom at 35+ and Beyond and My Years of No: An ADHD Story) reflect a DIY ethos rooted in care, curiosity, and self-expression.
Arianna Unabia Aquino
Arianna Unabia Aquino is a Filipina-American printmaker and illustrator from Chicago. They mainly utilize risograph printing in their work and derive inspiration from the thoughts that are stuck in their head, allowing intuition and exploration at the forefront of how they create.
CLEAR TRUTH
Johnny Willems (he/they) is a Mexican-American artist and social worker based in Indianapolis. His work combines printmaking, collage, and graffiti to explore themes of grief, spirituality, and community care. Johnny runs CLEAR TRUTH Studios which offers community self-publishing and screenprinting resources. CLEAR TRUTH is committed to the complete spiritual-material liberation of all beings.
Elegant Easel
Bold, thoughtful, and unapologetically expressive, my artwork explores story telling with detailed single page illustrations. My illustrations mostly consist of cats in a living space. Detailing home decor and funny cat moments, cats are an ideal essential for a home. My artwork also extends to sticker designs of feminist morals and disability awareness.
Eric Von Haynes / Chicago Printers Guild
Eric Von Haynes is a printmaker and designer with over 15 years of experience leading Flatlands Press, an imprint recognized for its innovative design and community-based projects. In addition to serving as President of the Chicago Printers Guild, he also teaches as an Instructor in Graphic Design at the UIC School of Design. He teaches offset production in the Print Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he shares his expertise in design, print techniques, substrates, and documentation. His work, blending creative and analytical approaches, has been acquired by prominent collections, including the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection in Chicago, the Center for Book Arts in New York, and the Illinois State Museum. His work has been featured in exhibitions at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and the Elephant Room Gallery. A committed community advocate, Eric co-founded Love Fridge Chicago, a mutual aid initiative supporting community fridges throughout the city. His practice extends to collaborative projects and public workshops, reinforcing his commitment to skill-sharing and community engagement.
Eric is the CUSPF 2025 Keynote Speaker and will be tabling representing work from the Chicago Printers Guild.
Han Beshey
Han Beshey is a zine artist who lives and works in the Midwest. Han has been creating zines from a young age, and enjoys making work that focuses on personal narrative, whether that be serious or silly in nature. Han is also a teacher, and considers educating others about zines, illustration, and printmaking to be just as important to her life, and informative to her artistic practice, as the art making itself is.
Kamila Glowacki & Mark Hewitt
Kamila Glowacki is a musician, artist, and museum educator based in Champaign, Illinois. She is currently continuing work on her autobiographical comic, “Bunny Splint,” which documents her experiences with injury, healing, and seeking meaning through nature. Kamila’s indie punk band, Nectar, exists as her main songwriting outlet. Mark Hewitt is a video artist, writer, library specialist, and gardener from Merkel, Texas now based in Champaign, Illinois. He is interested in VHS, experimental, and 16mm film and has contributed video work for the BBC, SXSW, and the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. Mark is the creator of "The Skeptic's Almanac,” a zine of investigative fiction, photography, short stories, and visual art playfully testing and reviewing the paranormal and the occult.
Miracle Brain
I’m a queer Mexican-American artist and storyteller based in Chicago. I never grew out of my love for cartoons, comics, and toys. Instead, I turned it into Miracle Brain, a universe inspired by 90s Nicktoons, lowbrow art, and pop surrealism. My work blends dark humor, camp, nostalgia, and philosophy wrapped like a bacon wrapped skewer into bizarre little characters and their stories. I’ve pitched original stories to Netflix, won script and comic competitions, and taught myself the art of storytelling from the ground up. Everything I make is about capturing that raw, offbeat energy I felt as a kid, and building a space for others who feel the same.
Moonville Zines
David (moonvillezines) is a zinester and middle school art teacher from northern IL. His zines include a mix of drawing, photography, collage, writing, and found imagery. His zines cover topics such as roller coasters, funky monsters, travel, chocolate bars, and more! He also has a selection of zines in Spanish!
Neve M.A.
Neve M.A. is a queer, trans, and poly cartoonist from Pittsburgh, PA. Their work ranges from campy queer smut, to matchbooks that plant seeds, to fiction about werewolves murdering fascists. Often, their work is risograph printed in the attic of the housing cooperative which they call home.
SOVEREIGN
Sovereign portrays a small Drag community in West Michigan, USA. Traditionally, the act of men dressing as hypersexualized women, Drag is an oddity in West Michigan, a conservative rural area. And yet a group mixing different genders, races, and sexualities can often pack a venue. Within mainstream culture today, Drag is presented as male, gay, competitive, and ceremonial. Sovereign presents a community that rejects these rigid rules and interpretations of Drag, creating a community for all who wish to participate. In a society with rigid and polarized views of gender, Sovereign looks at the Drag artists involved, and asks the question "What is drag and what is gender today?"
The 50 Flip Experiment
The 50 Flip Experiment is a funny, trippy comic book which may be enjoyed for its manifest content of jokes, funny cartoon animals, and science fiction conceits. Close readings (try putting it on the back of your toilet tank) will yield gnostic themes and explorations into the idea of eternal return (reusing jokes, sticking in cartoon animals from years ago). I have been drawing it for over 20 years and am wrapping up the 35th issue. I paint it in full color alone in the morning and copy it into books for you with a 100 dollar office copier I got from a nice guy on craigslist.
Thelma, Your Neighborhood Bookee
Thelma grew up near the abandoned ordnance plants, whose ruins remain in local fields. A former, 30 year, library technician, her last position was a government documents library specialist at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville's Lovejoy Library. Thelma enjoys local historical research; a hobby leading to four self-published projects earning her an Illinois Author designation. "Illinois Munitions” evolved by a request from an Illiopolis resident and is her final historical project.
UIUC Relief Printmakers
ARTS 405 Relief Printmaking is a course regularly offered by the School of Art & Design at UIUC, and is currently in progress this semester. Students in this course explore a variety of traditional and contemporary color relief printmaking techniques, from hand carving to digital technologies incorporating laser cutting and CNC router. Projects for the class engage with the history of relief printmaking as a tool for social change.
Urbana High School Art Club
Students participating from Urbana High School's Art Club.
Vegetables Are People Too
For years Julia ran a small organic farm with her husband. During that time, she developed characters to tell the stories of how to keep and treat each plant. The project evolved into a collection dedicated to anthropomorphic vegetables with familiar traits and challenges, all stumbling through their life cycles together yet separate. The vegetables range in personality from sweet to bitter in stories that include themes of Time, Ambition, Love, Loss and more.
Weird Little Homeschoolers
Weird Little Homeschoolers is a small print collective formed by UIUC MSLIS students Luisa (she/her) and Zadia (she/they). Luisa is a printmaker and book artist currently living in Urbana, Illinois. Her work focuses on the interaction between old craft and new technology, mixing the physical with the digital. She loves long rambling walks and the conclusions that can be drawn from them, odd illustrations in newspapers, and working with textiles, all of which appear in her publications. Zadia is a zinester originally hailing from Western Massachusetts. Their work discusses pop culture, disability, retro tech, and the odd interactions that make us all human. When she’s not making zines, she can be found staring at a wall while listening to music.
Work Press & Publication
Will Arnold is the co-founder [Work Press & Publication](https://www.workpandp.com/), a Risograph-based zine and artist book self-publishing venture. He is also an organizer for the CU Small Press Fest and the St. Louis Independent Comics Expo. Will’s artistic practice is primarily centered around zines, comics, and artist books. Through collage and delving into and remixing historical comics, he explores themes such as landscape, perception, memory, and gender.