Words & Pictures: A Graphic Novel Reading Event

This is an invitation for folks local to the San Francisco Bay Area to come out to a comics reading event that I'm hosting next Wednesday, April 29!

I have begun working part-time at the Mill Valley Public Library (a whole story unto itself – it's a beautiful library, really worth a visit). This will be the first comics event for adults that I host and it's going to be a banger. There is also a gallery show up featuring work from cartoonists who are reading. Hope to see you there!

Words & Pictures: A Graphic Novel Reading Event
Wednesday, April 29th, 6:30-8pm
Mill Valley Public Library, 375 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley, CA 94941
Registration encouraged!

Join us for a multimedia reading event: acclaimed cartoonists will take us on a journey with words and pictures, reading nonfiction, literary fiction, and memoir, as their drawings are projected. Readings from Donna Almendrala, Rina Ayuyang, JF Frankel, Justin Hall, and Frederick Noland, hosted by Sophie Yanow. If you are graphic-novel-curious, this is a great introduction to the medium.

Artist bios:

Donna Almendrala (Becoming a Dog Person) is a Sonoma County cartoonist whose comics have appeared in publications such as Vermont’s alternative weekly Seven Days, Bay Nature and other small press anthologies. Her work has been exhibited at the SF Cartoon Art Museum for the Emerging Artist Showcase. For her day job, she works at the Peanuts Studio and has contributed to projects such as Simon & Schuster’s Peanuts comic books, the 2018 Eisner Winner Celebrating Peanuts, and the Emmy-award winning animation The Snoopy Show. Becoming a Dog Person is her first graphic novel. For life updates on Max and more of Donna’s work, subscribe to patreon.com/dacomics

Rina Ayuyang is an Eisner-nominated cartoonist who has been a part of the vibrant Bay Area indie comics scene for over 25 years. Her comics explore family, identity, and community history. Her latest graphic novel, The Man in The McIntosh Suit, is a Filipino-American take on Depression-era noir featuring mistaken identities, speakeasies, and lost love in San Francisco's Manilatown. It was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New York Public Library. You can view more of Rina's work at www.rinaayuyang.com.

JF Frankel is a cartoonist residing in the East Bay. His recent comics, all about riding bikes, have appeared in Calling in Sick magazine and on The Radavist website. www.refreshingrectangles.com

Justin Hall is a comics artist, educator, and scholar. He created or co-created titles such as True Travel Tales, Hard to Swallow, and Theater of Terror: Revenge of the Queers, and has work in the Houghton Mifflin Best American Comics, Best Erotic Comics, SF Weekly, and more. He edited the Lambda-Award-winning collection No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics and was Producer of the award-winning documentary of the same name. Hall is the first Fulbright Scholar of Comics, a Professor of Comics at California College of the Arts, the Co-Organizer of Pride in Panels: SF Queer Comics Festival, and has written academic essays on comics and curated international exhibitions of comics art. www.justinhallawesomecomics.com

Frederick Noland focuses on less-known Black Historical Figures. He created San Francisco Black History, a comics public-art series for the San Francisco Arts Commission; and Respect Black Women, a collection of biographies-in-brief. Noland's work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New Haven Independent, Nickelodeon, and LA Weekly. He lives in Oakland, California.

Sophie Yanow is a California-based artist and writer. Her coming-of-age graphic novel The Contradictions (Drawn & Quarterly) won the 2019 Eisner for Best Webcomic and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Comics, Publishers Triangle Award, Ringo Award, and Harvey Award, and was longlisted for the Believer Book Award. She has been published by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Nib, The Paris Review and more. Her translation of Dominique Goblet’s Pretending is Lying received the Scott Moncrieff Prize and she has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow. She currently teaches in the MFA in Comics at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

This event is part of One Book, One Coast, a collaborative program uniting a wide network of West Coast library jurisdictions in a shared celebration of literacy, learning, community, and civil discourse.