A graffiti blackbook is a hardbound notebook filled with blank pages. Its exterior is almost always entirely black, with little to no ornamentation besides a pebbled finish. Despite this innocuous design, graffiti blackbooks, or “bibles” as they are sometimes known, are crucial community spaces within the graffiti writing community: a space where writers practice, circulate, and archive their work.

This webinar will provide audience members a glimpse into the rich relationship between graffiti writers and the spaces they occupy, spaces like the blackbook. Drawing on the forthcoming book The Writing of Where: Graffiti and the Production of Writing Spaces, this talk will provide an overview of those spaces: from the bold and broadly visible spots along the highway to the bridge underpasses seldom seen by the general public; from the freight yards to the bibles; from the model trains to the abandoned fac­tories. Using the blackbook as our focus, we will explore the ways that graffiti writers invent new locations of writing, new “wheres” that differently organize the spaces and places where writing exists in a given location.

Charles Lesh is an associate professor of English at Auburn University, where he teaches and writes on cultural studies, space and place, community and public writing, ethnography, and rhetorical theory. He is the author of The Writing of Where: Graffiti and the Production of Writing Spaces (Syracuse University Press, 2022). Charlie spends as much time as possible thinking about sneakers, basketball, and graffiti.