Miriam Libicki, Glasnost Kids: Using Comics to Explore How Culture Clash Forges Identity
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Joseph and Gertie Schwartz Memorial Lecture
Miriam Libicki (Graphic Novelist)
Curator's Talk, "Glasnost Kids: Using Comics to Explore How Culture Clash Forges Identity”
GLASNOST KIDS (Fantagraphics 2027) is a combined memoir and oral history about the exodus of Jews out of the collapsing USSR in the 1980s and 90s, and how the generation of child emigrants have changed their host communities in the US and Israel. The book is part oral history told by a dozen Israeli and American former Soviets, part memoir of an American-midwestern "host" and perpetual identity searcher, and part political and critical theory essay, pastiching art techniques in a braided structure. The lecture will include a reading, an exploration of technique and process, and why comics are uniquely suited to multifarious nonfiction.
Miriam Libicki is a graphic novelist, with a BFA in Visual Art from Emily Carr University and an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. She was the 2017 Writer in Residence at the Vancouver Public Library, and currently teaches illustration and humanities at Emily Carr University. Her short comics have been published by the Nib, Abrams, and Rutgers University Press. Her graphic essay collection, TOWARD A HOT JEW, was named a FORBES Top 10 graphic novel of 2016 and received the 2017 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature. Her essay WHO GETS CALLED AN UNFIT MOTHER was nominated for a 2020 Best Short Story Eisner. In 2022, she received the career achievement Inkpot at San Diego Comic-con. Libicki collaborated with David Schaffer to paint his memoir for BUT I LIVE (University of Toronto Press, 2022) a trio of illustrated accounts by child Holocaust survivors. BUT I LIVE received two PROSE awards, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and was nominated for a 2023 Nonfiction Eisner Award.