R178. Comics Confessional: The Allure of the Graphic Memoir

Room M100 A, Mezzanine Level
Thursday, April 9, 2015
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

 

While superheroes clearly still dominate the American comic book landscape, extraordinary graphic memoirs have fueled the rise of the literary graphic novel: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, David Small’s Stitches, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Why are comics such a compelling medium for autobiographical or confessional literature? This panel will examine how the visual medium provides authors with tools ideally suited for creating powerful, charged autobiographical literature.


Participants

Moderator:

J.R. Miller is the co-founding editor of (em) A Review of Text and Image. He is also the production editor at Sweet Publications and teaches creative writing in Florida. His prose has been published in numerous journals and his book, Nobody's Looking, will be released early 2015.

Jeffrey S. Chapman is a professor of creative writing at Oakland University, just north of Detroit. He has published fiction and graphic stories in journals including the Florida Review, Cutbank, and Fiction International.

Justin Hall is the creator of True Travel Tales, Hard To Swallow, and Glamazonia. He edited the Lambda and Eisner-nominated No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, and has work in Best American Comics and San Francisco Bay Guardian. He teaches comics at the California College of the Arts.

Nicole Oquendo is a writer, editor, teacher, and translator specializing in multimodal composition. She serves as an assistant editor for Sundress Publications, and is the nonfiction editor of Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, fillingStation, and Gulf Stream, among others.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center