Jessica Sapien, a UMKC graduate student in Arts with an emphasis on Public History, is the winner of the 2023 Martha Jane Starr Library Research Award.
Jessica was awarded $1,000 to support her research project, El amor de una madre: Feminism, Motherhood, and the Socio-Political Power of Zine-Making. Jessica describes her research:
“This project intends to explore how Chicanas have utilized self-published zines and zinemaking as an outlet to create dialogues on motherhood and social justice. Blending essays, poetry, art, ‘how-to’ guides, and other information, Chicana zine-creators have expressed the multiple meanings of motherhood while building a uniquely feminist community in the process. This project primarily focuses on the experiences of Chicana women and mothers in Texas who created zines from the 1990s to the present. I seek to examine the role of motherhood in their lives, their involvement in social justice work, and their reasons for choosing zine-making as an outlet for their story.”
In 2016 The UMKC Libraries won a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Challenge Grant, which established a small endowment to grant one UMKC graduate student each year with an award for research using the LaBudde Special Collections for research in women, gender, and sexuality studies.