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Faculty Invites: A Kind of Resistance: Illustrating Holocaust Survivor Stories

Tuesday, February 25, 2025
2:00 p.m.
W043A Dewey Room, Collaboration Commons, Patee Library
Faculty Invites: A Kind of Resistance: Illustrating Holocaust Survivor Stories
Miriam Libicki, Comic Artist

In this session, Libicki will show a detailed deconstruction of the process of building a graphic novel out of interviews and active collaboration with survivors, historians and researchers. She will discuss the unique strengths, as well as challenges, of using comics to depict the Holocaust, and to depict subjective memory in the absence of photographic documentation. A short observational drawing exercise during the lecture will allow participants to experience drawing as an act of memory, of observation, of communication and creation.

Miriam Libicki’s short comics have been published by The Nib, Abrams, Rutgers University Press, and the Journal of Jewish Identities. Her book of graphic essays, Toward a Hot Jew, received the 2017 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature, and her painted essay “Who Gets Called an Unfit Mother”was nominated for a 2020 Best Short Story Eisner. Libicki was the 2017 Writer in Residence at the Vancouver Public Library, and teaches illustration and humanities at Emily Carr University. Her most recent collaboration, an anthology of Holocaust survivor graphic memoirs titled But I Live, received a 2022 Canadian Book award.

Headshot of Miriam Libicki
Headshot of Miriam Libicki
W043A Dewey Room, Collaboration Commons, Patee Library