UNBANNED: MEET THE AUTHORS, READ THE BOOKS is a new series that is part of WDA’s collective effort to resist book banning by providing access to banned books. We’re unbanning the books by giving readers access to authors and their work. This event is being co-sponsored by the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC).

Alison Bechdel was born September 10, 1960, in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. She grew up in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, and attended high school where both of her parents taught English literature. After college, she began cartooning the lesbian-centered comic strips Dykes to Watch Out For. They were later compiled into a series of books with a quarter of a million copies in print. She also wrote and drew Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), a graphic memoir that encompasses her coming out story along with chronicling the perplexing relationship she had her father in response to his mysterious life. In 2012, Bechdel published another graphic memoir exploring the relationship she had with her other parent titled, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012). She has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney’s, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta. Her work is widely translated and anthologized.

About the Moderator:

Rachel DeWoskin is the author of absolute animal: poems (The University of Chicago Press, forthcoming, 2023); Two Menus: Poems (The University of Chicago Press, 2020); Banshee (Dottir Press, 2019); Someday We Will Fly (Penguin, 2019); Blind (Penguin, 2014); Big Girl Small (FSG, 2011); Repeat After Me (The Overlook Press, 2009); and Foreign Babes in Beijing (WW Norton, 2005). She is on the core Creative Writing Faculty at the University of Chicago, and affiliated faculty in the Centers for East Asian Studies and Jewish Studies.