Amy Kurzweil | |
|---|---|
 Kurzweil in 2017 | |
| Born | October 23, 1986 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation |
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| Alma mater | |
| Relatives | Ray Kurzweil (father) |
| Website | |
Official website  | |
Amy Kurzweil (born October 23, 1986) [1] is an American cartoonist and writer. In 2016, she published the graphic memoir Flying Couch. Her second graphic novel, Artificial: A Love Story was released in 2023. She draws cartoons for The New Yorker .
Kurzweil was born in Boston in 1986. [2] Her mother, Sonya, is a psychotherapist, and her father is the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil. [3] She graduated from Stanford University in 2009 and earned a master's degree in creative writing from the New School in New York City in 2013. [4] [5] She had multiple teaching jobs in the city, including dance at public schools and English at the Fashion Institute of Technology. [6] She aspired to a career in fiction writing, but in her twenties found "how much I loved to draw". [6] [7] An early cartooning influence was the work of Alison Bechdel. [6]
A graphic novel-cum-memoir by Kurzweil, Flying Couch, was published in 2016. Inspired by graphic novels such as Bechdel's Fun Home , Art Spiegelman's Maus , and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis , it tells the family history of her bubbe (grandmother) as a Holocaust survivor, her mother as a psychologist, and herself as a young woman. [7] [8] [9] The project began as Kurzweil's (non-cartoon) senior thesis at Stanford, and she continued to research, write, and eventually illustrate it over eight years. [3] [6] [7] Kurzweil drew significantly from an archive at the University of Michigan–Dearborn of oral histories of Holocaust survivors, including an interview with her grandmother. [7] [10] Reviews of the book were largely positive. [3] [8] [11]
Kurzweil's cartoons regularly appear in The New Yorker and other outlets. [6] Her second book, Artificial: A Love Story, follows the life of her father and her grandfather, another survivor of the Holocaust. [6] [12]
Alison Bechdel is an American cartoonist. Originally known for the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she came to critical and commercial success in 2006 with her graphic memoir Fun Home, which was subsequently adapted as a musical that won a Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. In 2012, she released her second graphic memoir Are You My Mother? She was a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Award. She is also known for originating the Bechdel test.
Dykes to Watch Out For was a weekly comic strip by Alison Bechdel. The strip, which ran from 1983 to 2008, was one of the earliest ongoing representations of lesbians in popular culture and has been called "as important to new generations of lesbians as landmark novels like Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) and Lisa Alther's Kinflicks (1976) were to an earlier one". It introduced the Bechdel test, a set of criteria for determining gender bias in works of entertainment, that has since found broad application.
Maus, often published as Maus: A Survivor's Tale, is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman, serialized from 1980 to 1991. It depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodern techniques, and represents Jews as mice and other Germans and Poles as cats and pigs respectively. Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992 it became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.
An autobiographical comic is an autobiography in the form of comic books or comic strips. The form first became popular in the underground comix movement and has since become more widespread. It is currently most popular in Canadian, American and French comics; all artists listed below are from the U.S. unless otherwise specified.
Persepolis is a series of autobiographical graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi that depict her childhood and early adult years in Iran and Austria during and after the Islamic Revolution. The title Persepolis is a reference to the ancient capital of the Persian Empire. Originally published in French, Persepolis has been translated to many other languages. As of 2018, it has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide.
The Holocaust has been a prominent subject of art and literature throughout the second half of the twentieth century. There is a wide range of ways–including dance, film, literature, music, and television–in which the Holocaust has been represented in the arts and popular culture.
Trina Robbins was an American cartoonist. She was an early participant in the underground comix movement, and one of the first women in the movement. She co-produced the 1970 underground comic It Ain't Me, Babe, which was the first comic book entirely created by women. She co-founded the Wimmen's Comix collective, wrote for Wonder Woman, and produced adaptations of Dope and The Silver Metal Lover. She was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2013 and received Eisner Awards in 2017 and 2021.
Julie Orringer is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor. She attended Cornell University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She was born in Miami, Florida and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, fellow writer Ryan Harty. She is the author of The Invisible Bridge, a New York Times bestseller, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories; her novel, The Flight Portfolio, tells the story of Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. The novel inspired the Netflix series Transatlantic.
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a 2006 graphic memoir by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, author of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It chronicles the author's childhood and youth in rural Pennsylvania, United States, focusing on her complex relationship with her father. The book addresses themes of sexual orientation, gender roles, suicide, emotional abuse, dysfunctional family life, and the role of literature in understanding oneself and one's family.
Nicole J. Georges is an American illustrator, writer, zinester, podcaster, and educator. She is well known for authoring the autobiographical comic zine Invincible Summer, whose individual issues have been collected into two anthologies published by Tugboat Press and Microcosm Publishing. Some of her other notable works include the graphic memoirs Calling Dr. Laura and Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home. In addition to this, Georges creates comics and teaches others how to make them, produces the Podcast Sagittarian Matters, and illustrates portraits of animals. She currently divides her time between Los Angeles, California and Portland, Oregon.
Sharona Muir is an American writer and academic.
Philippa, Lady Perry, is a British integrative psychotherapist and author. She has written the graphic novel Couch Fiction: A Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy (2010), How to Stay Sane (2012), The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (2019). The Book You Want Everyone You Love* To Read *(and maybe a few you don't) (2023).
Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama is a 2012 graphic memoir written and illustrated by Alison Bechdel, about her relationship with her mother. The book is a companion piece to her earlier work Fun Home, which deals with her relationship with her father. The book interweaves memoir with psychoanalysis and exploration of various literary works, particularly Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
Fun Home is a musical theatre adaptation of Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir of the same name, with music by Jeanine Tesori, and book and lyrics by Lisa Kron. The story concerns Bechdel's discovery of her own lesbian sexuality, her relationship with her closeted gay father, and her attempts to unlock the mysteries surrounding his life. It is told in a series of non-linear vignettes connected by narration provided by the adult Alison character.
Hillary Chute is an American literary scholar and an expert on comics and graphic narratives. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University. She was formerly associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago and an associate faculty member of the University’s Department of Visual Arts, as well as a visiting professor at Harvard University. She was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2007 to 2010.
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is a two-volume debut graphic novel by American writer Emil Ferris. It portrays a young girl named Karen Reyes investigating the death of her neighbor in 1960s Chicago. Ferris started working on the graphic novel after contracting West Nile virus and becoming paralyzed at age forty. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for writing and began the graphic novel to help her recover in 2010, taking six years to create 700 pages. The work draws on Ferris's childhood growing up in Chicago, and her love of monsters and horror media. The process of creating the book was difficult, with Ferris working long hours, living frugally, and encountering publishing setbacks, such as a cancelation by one publisher and the temporary seizure of the first volume's printing at the Panama Canal.
Tillie Walden is an American cartoonist who has published five graphic novels and a webcomic. Walden won the 2018 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work for her graphic novel Spinning, making her one of the youngest Eisner Award winners ever. She was named Vermont's Cartoonist Laureate for the years 2023 - 2026, making her the state's youngest-ever Cartoonist Laureate.
Liana Finck is an American cartoonist and author. She is the author of Passing for Human and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker.
Miriam Libicki is an American-Israeli graphic novelist based in Vancouver, Canada. Her work often centers on the intersection of being Jewish and American. Her past service in the Israel Defense Forces has provided both the basis of some of her work and the source of controversy in her career.
