Before I even sat down to interview Kelsey Graywill about her zines, Perse Van Ort, the barista ringing us up at The Daily, recognized her and complimented Graywill’s coffee zine.
“It inspired my sense of curiosity after moving here from Chicago,” Van Ort said, “It’s so warm and joyful.”
Made in collaboration with local shops, the “Hyperlocal Durham Coffee Passport” includes a map of places to get coffee in Durham and is formatted like a scavenger hunt, encouraging users to get stamped at each venue. (There’s a bonus stamp if you bike to the spots.) When she created the zine, back in 2023, Graywill also crafted an individual stamp for each shop, engraving each at the Durham County Library’s Makerspace.
Graywill first moved to Durham in 2014 as an undergraduate at Duke University, where she first began making zines. Short for “fanzine,” zines are usually small, self-published booklets made by hand, often consisting of only a single sheet of paper that is smartly folded and cut into pages. Long a part of DIY culture, the low cost and easy access of zine making allows creators to share art, experiences, and knowledge outside of traditional media.
After graduating, Graywill moved to London to pursue a master’s degree. When it came time to move to a new city, again, she chose Durham and moved back in 2021.
“The zines started for me as a way of trying to find my place here,” said Graywill, who has since organized a network of creative makers called Hyperlocal Durham. The inspiration for both her work and the collective, she says, is a desire to better understand and contribute to her new home in meaningful ways.
“My experience living in Durham as a working-class adult was much different than as a student—when I was in college for four years in Durham, I wasn’t living in Durham. I was living at Duke,” Graywill said. “When I moved back, I really had to reassess, ‘What does it mean to be a good member of a community? A community that you didn’t grow up in, that you don’t really have a tether to through family or childhood or anything?’”
Since returning, Graywill has made about a zine a month for her “Hyperlocal Dispatch” series, many of which are available for sale in a customized vending machine she created that is located in the Durham Food Hall. Each zine highlights a highly specific aspect of life in the Bull City, from where to forage figs to good spots in the city to cry (to name a few such spots: Queeny’s podcast studio, the Carolina Theatre, the Corcoran Street parking deck).
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Some look at Bull City history through a particular lens, often revealing untold—or at least underreported—stories about particular communities, like the ice cream one, or another work about the indigenous history of Durham entitled “Before It Was Durham It Was Adshusheer.” There are also several of her zines focused on transit and cycling, including a heartbreaking guide that maps the city’s “ghost bike” memorials, places where bike riders lost their lives.
Alongside the “dispatch” zines, about local history, culture and ecology, which are created solely by Graywill, the vending machine carries some of Hyperlocal’s passports, like the coffee one, which are collaborations with local community organizations and meant to be easy ways to explore the city as users move from place to place collecting stamps along the way. All of the passport-style zines are open-source and available online to print from home for free. (Graywill cautions that not all of the spots are still doing stamps.)
A partnership with Preservation Durham created a “Queer History Tour” passport of LGBTQ+ landmarks; another, with Discover Durham, yielded 2026’s “Love Durham” zine, a guide to supporting the city’s unique character and culture.
“That’s really the essence of Hyperlocal—
kelsey graywill, creator, hyperlocal
I have a small life.”
Graywill is a researcher at heart—her master’s degree is in cognitive neuroscience—and documents what she calls the “the seasonal rituals and rhythms” of the city via biking and walking. (She doesn’t own a car.)
“That’s really the essence of Hyperlocal—I have a small life,” Graywill said.
But a visit to the downtown vending machine that stocks the Hyperlocal zines shows how one small life can grow into a hub of community appreciation and activity. Alongside her zines, the machine distributes the work of other zinemakers and limited edition prints by local artists, essentially acting as a micropress for Durham creators.
The volume and depth of the subjects covered in the material reveal how dynamic life in Durham is, and the zine format allows for all kinds of lo-fi fun.
Artist Marina Fela-Castillo, for instance, created a zine of recommendations of affordable things to do around the city that users are meant to color in. Engineer Meredith Biechele’s zine about how to “dumb cellphones”—e.g., temporarily block distracting apps like social media —includes a list of local spots to enjoy screen-free and a 3D printed brandless “brick,” a physical device that blocks the Internet when you touch your phone to it.
“I don’t believe or subscribe to the notion that you have to buy your way into a community,” Graywill said. “And so another part of this practice has been like, ‘How can I find ways of helping other people and also helping myself to discover the community in ways that don’t just involve spending money?”
“She’s a public historian who’s working through zines as her principal medium. With her zines and mapmaking, Kelsey’s doing what some people call like critical cartography.”
Adam Rosenblatt, comic artist and professor
“She’s a public historian who’s working through zines as her principal medium,” said Adam Rosenblatt, a comic artist, anthropologist, and professor at Duke who often invites Graywill into the classroom to mentor his students.
“With her zines and mapmaking, Kelsey’s doing what some people call critical cartography. I could put all these serious labels on it, but the magical thing about Kelsey that’s so great is she does these very serious things, like looking at Durham’s unknown indigenous histories, or the Queer History Zine, and also, there’s a lot of humor.”
Rosenblatt teaches a community-engaged class called “Death, Burial and Justice in the Americas,” where students learn about burial grounds in the area, like the historic Geer Cemetery, by reaching out to the communities that care for them. Working in teams, the students transform their research into zines—some of which might become part of the “Durham Cemetery Zine” series Rosenblatt is currently developing for Hyperlocal.
A couple days later, we’re back at The Daily where about a dozen folks have gathered, pushing tables together to create a space for folding Hyperlocal’s newest zine, a passport conceived of in collaboration with local bookstores.
Louise Farrell, a bookseller from Letters Community Bookshop, approached Graywill wanting to collaborate on a zine; she now sits beside me, patiently modeling how to properly cut and fold the paper into the tiny booklet. When complete, the zine resembles a book’s spine and, as Graywill points out excitedly, makes for an ideal bookmark. Kimora Baker, from The Regulator Bookshop, is also at the table folding—both stores will stock copies of the zine.
Along with the booksellers, there are friends and other longtime collaborators of Graywill’s in attendance, including Rosenblatt and Fela-Castillo, all chatting and working. As we work, someone jokes that Hyperlocal should start a dating service—one couple formed while using the coffee zine to bike around together—elsewhere, there’s playful ribbing of Graywill for all the free labor being provided.
The event reflects Hyperlocal’s ethos of creating participatory spaces and Graywill’s ability to connect people. It also embodies what the zines, no matter what the subject, are also about: finding people with shared values. While Hyperlocal started with Graywill, its expansive mission has grown beyond her, too, and that’s by design. As she wrote in an email, “Part of the work has been figuring out how to invite others into the work—and literally into the vending machine.”
While she’s still very much at the helm curating, publishing, and distributing works under the Hyperlocal umbrella, she’s also been approached by other cities who want to replicate the kind of platform for sharing local stories she’s created in Durham.
Thinking about the city in a different way—or thinking about the way that [we] move through any city in a different way–is really the higher-level goal of a lot of it.”
kelsey graywill, creator,
hyperlocal
“For me, it has always been about trying to balance the whimsy and the fun of learning with things that are heavier and harder to digest and are often more complicated than a zine can really even convey,” Graywill said. “Trying to figure out how to be an entry point for people into discovering more, or thinking about the city in a different way—or thinking about the way that they move through any city in a different way–is really the higher-level goal of a lot of it.”
That aspiration is apparent in another new zine entitled, “Hyperlocal Habit: A Practical Guide to Finding Belonging Anywhere,” a collaboration with Ashley Hernandez, an urban studies scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before moving to Durham, Hernandez’s research centered on anti-gentrification activism in her hometown neighborhood of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles.
“In that work, there’s a lot of art that’s made and a lot of zinemaking, stickermaking, you know, different ways of getting your opinion and voice out,” Hernandez said.
When she moved to Durham three years ago, one of Hernandez’s neighbors saw her biking and gave her a Hyperlocal zine by Graywill about how to safely bike around Durham. Immediately a fan, Hernandez ran into Graywill (at The Daily, of course) and a friendship and ongoing working relationship formed around a shared interest in community support and concern about the displacement of Durham’s long-term residents.
Hernandez invited Graywill to speak to her “Inequality in Cities” class about zines and their role in placemaking, and Graywill asked Hernandez to help her make the Hyperlocal zine that deals directly with gentrification.
“You are a local when a place and its people recognize you as accountable to them, and you recognize yourself as accountable to them,” a cartoon illustration of Hernandez says in the “Hyperlocal Habit,” as the zine discusses who gets to be a local in any given community. But beyond just being local, the zine encourages individuals to break down what that means and why it matters so much to tune in, connect, and contribute to the place you inhabit.
Hyperlocal is baked in with this philosophy—for all the fun illustrations and great colors, there’s a rigor to the zines that demands self-reflexivity of its readers, especially the “Hyperlocal Habit.”
Whether it’s as simple as encouraging readers to notice the smells around them and the time that certain fruits ripen, or step-by-step instructions for how to build a habit of belonging, Hyperlocal is not just revealing the cool places or hidden stories of our city, it’s teaching a process of opening ourselves up to inhabit the city in newly vulnerable ways—interconnected, responsible, and, yes, sometimes even whimsical.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the year that Graywill moved to Durham and clarify a quote from Adam Rosenblatt.
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