Alycia Sellie is the Collection Development Librarian for the Graduate Center Library. In addition to collaborating with students and faculty, she helps organize and streamline the department’s approach to local collections and fosters partnerships with consortial libraries.

Before joining CUNY in 2009, Alycia worked at the Pratt Institute Library in Brooklyn, and she had her start working in the distinguished Newspapers and Periodicals department of the Wisconsin Historical Society Library under the mentorship of alternative and radical press expert James Danky.

Alycia has specialized in unique library collections and zine librarianship. She debuted the Brooklyn College Library Zine Collection in 2012, a living archive of works made by and for Brooklyn College students. While in library school, Alycia founded the Library Workers Zine Collection. Alycia’s work on these collections grew out of her experiences organizing national zine events and from making her own publication, The Borough is My Library: A Metropolitan Library Workers’ Zine.

Alycia’s research interests focus on the history of alternative library collections, radical librarianship, and print culture studies. She is also engaged in issues surrounding critical librarianship, and the complex terrain of making electronic books available to researchers through libraries. She co-founded the Open Access @ CUNY blog (now known as Open @ CUNY), the Readers’ Bill of Rights for Digital Books project and she continues to explore issues of social justice and digital work in the humanities.

Alycia currently serves as delegate and secretary to the Graduate Center chapter of the Professional Staff Congress, the union that represents 30,000 faculty and staff at the City University of New York and the CUNY Research Foundation. All members of the PSC have been working under an expired contract since February 28, 2023.

Alycia holds a B.S. in Fine Art and an M.A. in Library Science, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at the Graduate Center, where her thesis project explored the intersections of zines and copyleft.

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