Thursday, March 21, 2024
Craft Talk: 2-3:15 p.m.*
Linville Falls, Room 226, Plemmons Student Union
Reading: 6 p.m.*
Table Rock, Room 201B, Plemmons Student Union
* Please note: These presentations deal with adult issues and are not appropriate for younger teens.
About Kayla E.
Kayla E. is a Texas-born artist and designer of Mexican-American descent. Her comics practice centers around her childhood and functions as a map-making exercise. Leaning heavily on the fixed compositional structure and aesthetic codes of post-war American comics, she imposes order onto recollections once disorganized by intrafamilial abuse, addiction, and sexual violence. Her textile work and painting practice are concerned with memories that present as unmappable. She works as creative director at Fantagraphics and is the co-founder and resident of Nat. Brut Inc., a non-profit that produces the art and literary magazine Nat. Brut. She earned her B.A. from Harvard University, where she was awarded the Albert Alcalay Prize in Visual Arts and served as the art director for the Harvard Lampoon. As a public speaker, E. has been invited to expand on her practice at universities and creative conferences across the country. For the past few years, she has worked out of her downtown attic studio in rural North Carolina, where she lives with her wife, Laura Bullard. Kayla is a recipient of a Princeton Hodder Fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year. Precious Rubbish, her experimental graphic memoir, will be published by Fantagraphics in 2024.
Visit her website: kaylaework.com
Precious Rubbish is forthcoming!
Advance praise for Precious Rubbish (Fantagraphics, 2025):
“This is the scariest book I have ever read.”
— Mark Newgarden, author of How to Read Nancy and We All Die Alone
“Born into the long lineage of self-dissecting comics autobiography, Kayla E.’s complicated work leaves no stone unthrown within the glass funhouse of her own making. Her work may help you come to terms with some things you've been privately avoiding or even things about yourself you didn’t know. She’s also a kind, gentle, and extremely thoughtful person.”
— Chris Ware, author of Rusty Brown and Building Stories
“Kayla E.'s comics remind me of the orphan-in-jeopardy genre. Throughout, she is cast as a plucky heroine you root for and yet wonder, ‘How can she possibly escape?’ And the answer is through the author's courage, wit, and originality. If one person's trash is another's treasure, Precious Rubbish is transmutation at its most therapeutic.”
— Tim Hensley, author of Detention #2 and Sir Alfred #3