Honoring Jen Angel’s Life and Legacy

AMP remembers and celebrates Jen Angel, a founder of our organization, who died recently in Oakland, CA.  We are one of the many social justice organizations that Jen built and contributed to in her lifetime.  Even though Jen has not been involved with AMP for many years, our work will be forever shaped by the foundations she laid, back in 1999 when she, along with Jason Kuscma, founded the Midwest Zine Fest, which would later evolve into the Allied Media Conference. 

In remembering Jen, we want to amplify the beautiful words of her family, who wrote:

“Friends and family of Jen hope that the story of this last chapter of her brilliant, full, dynamic life is one focused on her commitment to community, on the care bestowed upon her and her family by the people who loved her, and on the generous and courageous role of countless health care workers and public servants who fought to preserve her life. We know Jen would not want to continue the cycle of harm by bringing state-sanctioned violence to those involved in her death or to other members of Oakland’s rich community.

As a long-time social movement activist and anarchist, Jen did not believe in state violence, carceral punishment, or incarceration as an effective or just solution to social violence and inequity. The outpouring of support and care for Jen, her family and friends, and the values she held dear is a resounding demonstration of the response to harm that Jen believed in: community members relying on one another, leading with love, centering the needs of the most vulnerable, and not resorting to vengeance and inflicting more harm.

Jen believed in a world where everyone has the ability to live a dignified and joyful life and worked toward an ecologically sustainable and deeply participatory society in which all people have access to the things they need, decisions are made by those most directly affected by them, and all people are free and equal.”

Former staff and board members of AMP, who worked with Jen in the early days of the organization’s founding, share these remembrances:

“Jen Angel has passed. Jen, and her co-editors Jason and Josh, gave me a chance to intern at Clamor Magazine when I was in my early 20s, and then a chance to organize with them the last Allied Media Conference in Bowling Green in 2006, where I learned their model for how to organize an independent media conference, lessons I had the fortune to apply for many years after. Jen is the person that first showed me how to use Quickbooks and some accounting basics, and this helped set me on my path…what I learned from Jen was the importance of work ethic and specialized skills as a way to contribute to the movement.

Jen was an icon of 90s zine culture. With Jason Kucsma she was a co-founder of Clamor Magazine, which hosted the Midwest Zine Conference, which later became the Allied Media Conference. She was a founding board member of Allied Media Projects. After she left Clamor and Allied Media, Jen ran a booking agency and event production group called Aid & Abet, and then founded a popular community-based bakery in Oakland, CA. This was a life dedicated to connecting people and sustaining independent projects.

After having been away from the Allied Media Conference for many years, Jen attended the conference in ~2018. I remember sitting with her at a plenary in the Community Arts Auditorium and thanking her for helping me get going in the work and telling her that I stayed in it because it was never the same and ever evolving. Thank you Jen Angel for the impact you had on my life, and the connections you made for me. The work carries on, building and re-building.”

– Mike Medow

“Like so many others, I met Jen through her publishing. I encountered Clamor Magazine in an independent bookstore in Brooklyn in late spring 2001. When I flipped through it, the pages hummed with a visionary optimism that defied ideology. There was a punk aesthetic to the cover and it was clearly a product of the global social justice movement that I knew from my participation in the Indymedia network. Inside, the layout was no-nonsense and the stories were practical, relatable. I got the sense that readers who were not part of any movement would still feel a connection to the authors and the subjects of the articles. For me, I felt a connection to the publishers. The masthead offered an address and phone number in Bowling Green, Ohio.

When I moved to the Midwest just a few months later, I called the Clamor phone number and asked if I could visit their office. I was surprised to learn the whole operation consisted of two people and an iMac operating out of their spare bedroom. I was more surprised still to learn they also published an annual Zine Yearbook and convened an annual Underground Publishing Conference. They ran the projects as a small business, Become The Media, that they had launched with the support of the Ohio Small Business Administration and a business loan from the regional bank.

After the phone call, we met up and seemed to click, and I asked if I could help them with the magazine. One of my first contributions was to help them with the bimonthly mailing of magazines to subscribers. Later, Clamor would hire a fulfillment service, but at this point the process involved a stack of magazines, a stack of envelopes, sheets of address labels, and the stamping machine laid out in the publishers’ living room. When Jen noticed that I was doing the stuffing first, then all of the labeling, in contrast to her approach, she kind of chuckled and said to Jason, “He thinks it’s faster to handle each envelope twice.” Clearly, she had developed a method with intention and purpose. I switched to Jen’s method.

As a collaborator, I loved that she knew how things should be done to maximize efficiency. As a New Yorker, I loved that she was direct and self-assured. I loved that she didn’t suffer fools, even when the fool was me.

Though she found the financial struggles of the Become The Media business taxing, I never saw Jen care to be popular. As a publisher, her focus was on the writers and artists who mostly came from the community of readers and supporters, many getting paid for their media work for the first time. (Clamor contributors always got paid, even if it wasn’t a huge sum and even at the risk of Become The Media never being able to pay down the original loan from the bank.) It was the zine movement, networked through the social infrastructure of a bimonthly magazine.

Looking back from today’s social media and search-optimized perspective, it’s hard to remember just how analog a process it was in the early 2000s to connect with potential collaborators, and how challenging that was in particular for people from small towns or families that disapproved of their politics, aesthetics, or sexuality. Jen wasn’t everyone’s people, but she helped a lot of people find their people. Jen had a radical faith in the power of those connections.

Soon after we met, Jen and Jason had the opportunity to form a nonprofit to complement the business operation. Even though I had just started working with them, they asked me to join them in launching this new organization. In January 2002 we established Allied Media Projects. The following year, we began operating the conference under the nonprofit and rebranded it as the Allied Media Conference. More than twenty years on, co-founding AMP is still a highlight of my professional life.

We were in only infrequent contact after we transitioned AMP to new leadership in Detroit and Clamor stopped publishing. Unfortunately, we didn’t connect last spring when I was finally able to get back to the Bay Area. I loved that she had built a new life in Oakland as a baker and I’m glad she knew how happy my family and I were to finally be able to savor the cupcakes we had only been able to see in pictures. But I wish I had been able to tell her one more time how I treasure having had the chance to know and work with her.”

– Josh Breitbart

“I was reminded by one of my oldest comrades this week that if it hadn’t been for Jen Angel, I would have never connected with what became Allied Media, and never built some of the most formative political and personal relationships of my life. 

I remember building wireless radio point to point cantennas with Jen. I remember the back and forth of the editing process with Jen, her patient support as I wrote many articles for Clamor about my organizing work in community radio, and started to apply that to a larger thesis of the relationship between media and technology and the potential for powerbuilding in this country.  

I remember conversations with her about Clamor closing, and the complicated feelings she held in seeing what had been the midwestern zine conference transform into Allied Media under leadership from Detroit organizers. That is my sharpest memory of her. Sitting with her and being witness to the kind of mourning and reckoning that comes with complicated – though necessary – change. As I have faced that change in my own work over the years I have often reflected in how grateful I was to witness her feelings. 

She was a searcher and a yearner and a connector. Our emails about media and regulation and community and technology changed to occasional reach outs and Facebook likes over the last years. I was so happy she had her community, her bakery, her beloved. Dang, I’m sorry I can’t know her better now in this stage of my life and hers. May her memory be for a blessing.” 

– Hannah Sassaman