“I was voted most likely to become an anarchist.”

Angela Brown laughs when she says it now, remembering eighth grade at Churchill Junior High. The label was meant as a joke, but it captured something real. Even then, she gravitated toward the edges of culture, toward the people and ideas that didn’t fit neatly into Salt Lake City’s dominant script.

Today Brown is the publisher and owner of SLUG Magazine, one of the city’s longest-running independent publications and a central voice in Utah’s alternative arts and music scene. She is also the founder of Craft Lake City, a nonprofit that has grown into one of the state’s largest platforms for local makers and creative entrepreneurs.

But long before she ran a magazine or organized festivals drawing thousands of people, Brown as a teenager was trying to understand the world around her.

Angela grew up the youngest of six children in a conservative LDS household in Salt Lake City. But life at home was complicated. Her mother lived with bipolar schizophrenia, a condition that brought periods of hospitalization, medication changes, and long stretches where the family navigated uncertainty.

Those experiences shaped the atmosphere of the household. Psychiatric care during the 1980s and 1990s often meant experimental medication regimens and constant adjustments. Her father worked constantly to support the family and cover medical expenses. He was also an entrepreneur and a creative thinker, encouraging his daughter to follow her interests and think independently.

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That encouragement mattered. Angela had already begun exploring worlds beyond the one she grew up in.

“I was really into music. I was really into punk rock. I was into goth. I was into hardcore.”

The attraction was not simply rebellion. Brown describes it more like a fascination with how different communities lived and expressed themselves.

“Almost like an anthropologist,” she says. “This is how people live. This is so interesting.”

That curiosity eventually led her to a small publication circulating around Salt Lake City’s music scene.

SLUG Magazine.

SLUG stands for Salt Lake Underground. The publication began in 1989 when local musician J.R. Ruppel found that the city’s traditional newspapers had little interest in covering emerging bands or the growing underground music culture.

Instead of waiting for coverage, Ruppel created his own.

Working as a pressman at a printing company that produced The Private Eye—an alternative newspaper that later evolved into City Weekly—he learned the mechanics of print publishing. With advice from others in the alternative press community, he launched a small black-and-white zine on newsprint.

The early editions were simple: two colors at most, limited distribution, and content focused squarely on the music and counterculture scenes that mainstream media ignored.

In a pre-internet era, those pages carried real weight. If someone wanted to know which bands were playing, what clubs mattered, or where Salt Lake’s creative underground gathered, SLUG was often the only place to look.

Angela was still a teenager when she first encountered it.

“I was a preteen, living in a very conservative LDS kind of family,” she says. “And SLUG was this window into something completely different.”

The magazine showed a Salt Lake City that felt larger and more complex than the one she saw day to day.

In junior high, an English teacher assigned students a project: create their own zine. Angela modeled hers directly after SLUG.

“I made ‘Chug’—Churchill Underground,” she says, laughing at the memory.

She clipped SLUG advertisements, pasted them into her mockup, and built a small handmade magazine. Years later, while cleaning out old belongings, she found the project again and threw it away out of embarrassment.

Now she wishes she had kept it.

Brown began working at SLUG in the late 1990s, learning the business and editorial side of the publication from the inside. After two years with the magazine, she purchased it in 2000.

Taking over an independent print publication was never going to be easy. Advertising models were already shifting, and the digital revolution would soon transform media entirely.

But Brown saw SLUG as more than a business. It was a cultural platform that had helped define Salt Lake City’s creative identity for a generation.

“I’ve been in the game for over 25 years now,” she says.

During that time, the media landscape around her changed dramatically. Many alternative publications disappeared. Print advertising shrank. Online media altered how audiences discovered music and events.

SLUG survived by continuing to focus on what it had always done best: documenting and amplifying local culture.

The magazine remained a platform for emerging bands, artists, filmmakers, and community voices who might otherwise go unheard.

In 2009, Brown expanded that mission beyond the printed page.

SLUG organized a new event at the Gallivan Center called Craft Lake City. The first year included 72 artisans and roughly 2,000 attendees. Handmade goods filled the booths. Local bands performed. Food vendors added energy to the crowd.

What began as a modest experiment quickly revealed something larger.

“As an artist myself, as someone born and raised here in Salt Lake City, we needed a place where creatives could come together and be seen,” Brown says.

At first she attempted to run Craft Lake City as a traditional business. The model proved difficult to sustain, and she eventually restructured the organization as a nonprofit.

The decision allowed the event to expand into a broader mission: educating, promoting, and inspiring Utah’s creative community.

Nearly two decades later, Craft Lake City has grown into one of the state’s largest arts organizations. Its annual DIY Festival attracts tens of thousands of visitors. Additional programs include a holiday market in Ogden, partnerships with cities such as Millcreek, and the Letter West conference in Midvale, which brings international artists to Utah to teach sign painting, calligraphy, hand lettering, and street art.

Brown describes the project as an effort to keep creative talent rooted in Utah.

“A lot of individuals felt like they needed to leave Utah,” she says. “And I wanted to keep them here.”

For Brown, Salt Lake City has always been both home and inspiration.

She grew up navigating a complicated family environment, learning resilience early while supporting her mother through years of mental health challenges and medical treatments. She stepped into guardianship roles and spent nights in hospital waiting rooms while also building a career in publishing.

Through it all, the city remained the constant.

“I’m going to stay here,” she says. “I want to make this city, this state, a place that I want to live in.”