Amy Kurzweil | |
|---|---|
 Kurzweil in 2017 | |
| Born | October 23, 1986 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation |
|
| 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]
