Research and Nonfiction Comics with Ellen Forney and Caitlin Cass

October 2 12:00 pm

Virtual

About the Event

This panel features authors Ellen Forney and Caitlin Cass, both of whom have written nonfiction comic works – one about suffragettes, and one hybrid memoir/self-help book on mental health. They will discuss the role played by research in writing nonfiction comics.

Ellen Forney is an author, artist, speaker, and mental health coach. Her work includes the New York Times bestselling graphic memoir, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me, the story of her diagnosis and struggle with bipolar disorder, and its companion book, Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life, a mental health guide and the basis for her coaching. Marbles has been translated into six foreign languages, and was selected for campus-wide book programs at the University of Washington and the University of California, Davis. Rock Steady was selected as a Best Graphic Medicine Publication by JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association). For both books, Ellen was awarded the Media Partner Award from the Washington National Alliance for Mental Illness.

Caitlin Cass makes comics, cartoons and art installations about failing systems and irrational hope. Story by story she is building her own canon in a doomed effort to understand the dismal state of the world. For the past 13 years Caitlin has published a bimonthly comic periodical under the moniker The “Great” Moments in Western Civilization Postal Constituent. Her cartoons and comics have appeared in The New Yorker, The Lily and The Nib. Caitlin was a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and a 2024 NAC Fellow in Non-Fiction. Her 2020 solo exhibition Women’s Work was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Caitlin’s first full length graphic history Suffrage Song came out with Fantagraphics Books in June 2024.