Hillary Chute at the Brooklyn Book Festival

Four different Columbia University Press authors will be participating in the upcoming Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, September 18th. The festival has become one of the major literary events in New York City and one of the largest of its kind in the United States.

This week we’ll feature the authors and their panels. First up in Hillary Chute, author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. In her book, Chute examines the works of leading women graphic novelists, including Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Lynda Barry, Marjane Satrapi and Alison Bechdel. Chute explores their verbal and visual techniques, which have transformed autobiographical narrative and contemporary comics. Through the interplay of words and images, and the counterpoint of presence and absence, they express difficult, even traumatic stories while engaging with the workings of memory. Intertwining aesthetics and politics, these women both rewrite and redesign the parameters of acceptable discourse.

Chute will be moderating the panel Drawing a Life:

How do you draw someone else’s memories? Eisner-nominated Dean Haspiel (Cuba: My Revolution) illustrated the memoir of revolutionary turned refugee Inverna Lockpez. Pulitzer nominee Lauren Redniss (Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout) blends research and imagination in a haunting portrait of Marie Curie and rising star artist GB Tran (Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey) turns to his own family’s history to portray a war-torn, transnational generation.