Comics reading with slide show. Cartoonists Tyler Cohen, Marguerite Dabaie, Jennifer Camper, and Beldan Sezen read from new work that covers politics, sex, humor, strange ideas, and the riddle of human existence. Q&A and book signing to follow.
Jennifer Camper is a cartoonist and graphic artist. Her books include “Rude Girls and Dangerous Women” and “subGURLZ”, and she edited two “Juicy Mother” comics anthologies. Her work appears in numerous publications, comic books, and anthologies, and has been exhibited internationally. She is the founding director of the biennial Queers & Comics Conference.
Tyler Cohen is a cartoonist who uses autobiography and surrealism to explore gender, parenthood, race, and female experience in her book Primahood: Magenta (Stacked Deck Press). Her work has appeared online at PEN America/PEN Illustrated and MuthaMagazine.com and in print in the Ignatz Award-winning anthology, Qu33r, Alphabet, and The Feminist Utopia Project. Primahood: Magenta is a Finalist for the Bisexual Book Awards.
Marguerite Dabaie’s first major comic, The Hookah Girl and Other True Stories–an autobiography about Palestinian-Americans–was awarded two grants. The cultural differences she has felt between Arab and American cultures heavily informs her work. She strives to combine comics with academia, something that dovetailed into her work on A Voyage to Panjikant, a historical-fictional graphic novel about the 7th-century Silk Road (Rosarium Publishing 2018).
Beldan Sezen is a visual storyteller using various conventions of comics and film. In 2008 her animated cartoon From the Diaries of Two Breasts premiered at the Pink Film Days in Amsterdam. Her short comic A Girl Named Halt was published as a matchbox-book in 2009 and has become a collector’s item. In 2011 she won the Three-in-One Chapbook Contest Prize for her graphic short stories “Fear City,” “Girls,” and “Demons.” Her first graphic-murder mystery, Zakkum, was first installed in a museum space, Frauenmuseum Wiesbaden, as a giant walk-though of the book and was published in 2011 by Treehouse Press, London, and listed for the 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her first work as a comic reporter, #Gezi Park, was listed for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her second graphic novel, Snapshots of a Girl, was published in 2014 and named to the American Library Asssocation’s Over the Rainbow List for the best LGBT books for adult readers in 2015. She was awarded a 2015 Global Arts Fund Award by the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. Her recent books are represented by Booklyn, and institutional collectors include The New York Public Library, Grinnell College, University of Delaware, Stanford University, and the Library of Congress.