Anne Elizabeth Moore Born in the town of Winner, South Dakota, Anne Elizabeth Moore was first published at the age of 15, when a national youth literary magazine printed a poem about her feelings. In the two decades since, Moore’s work has encompassed many kinds of writing that are not poetry, and has been published in The Onion, the Chicago Reader, Bitch, Tin House, Stayfree!, The Progressive, the Journal of Popular Culture, and Punk Planet. Most of her high school career was spent at the same high school that F. Scott Fitzgerald attended—at least, they told her that, although it was many years before she realized he had been expelled before graduation.

She studied photography at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, which was very cold; worked briefly writing comedy at The Onion; and then attended graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, because she likes lions. After receiving her MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism, she went to live on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota for a summer, mistakenly believing that three months surrounded by dirty kids, rattlesnakes, and dust would put her on the fast track to a museum directorship. Following a brief return to Chicago, Moore moved to Seattle, Washington just in time for the WTO riots, in which she participated, and the dot-com bust, in which she did not.

Moore began self-publishing, with a fanzine by and about people named Anne called AnneZine, in late 1993. Since, she has created over 30 single-shot zines on topics as significant as pie and as meaningless as international coffeeshop chains. Despite dire warnings from her financial advisors, she continues to self-publish whatever of her work she feels would just work best in a cute little hand-bound format.

While in Seattle, Moore wrote Hey Kidz, Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People (Soft Skull Press, 2004) and Stop Reading This: A Manifesto for Radical Literacy (Seattle Research Institute, 2004). She worked at Fantagraphics Books as the editor of The Comics Journal, and oversaw a year of that publication and the first two Comics Journal Special Editions (2002). Her work in comics earned her the title Industrial Strength Woman from the feminist comics group Friends of Lulu. During this time, Moore also co-founded and edited the magazine Matte, which developed a fast following before ceasing publication three issues later.

Lured back to Chicago by the global warming, Moore took up with Independents’ Day Media, a mini-media conglomerate that includes the bimonthly magazine Punk Planet and Punk Planet Books. She has taught journalism at Columbia College—Chicago and art in the University of Illinois at Chicago’s graduate department. A recent show at Columbia College’s Book and Paper Center, from Art to Zine, displayed a retrospective of much of her zine work. A fast-growing obsession with a certain doll-buying emporium was cut short when police intervened and banned her permanently from the store.

For several years, in addition to the daily grind of writing for, editing, and publishing Punk Planet, Moore was the series editor for Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics books, a part of the Best American series established in 1915 to annually collect the best literature produced in North America into one volume. This last job sounded fancy enough, but really she sat around and read comics all day. The demise of Punk Planet and the declining vitality of independent culture are documented in her well-regarded recent New Press release, Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity.

Currently, Moore is focusing on becoming an adventurer.

Cirriculum Vitae