Cartoonist Alison Bechdel will present her work and perspectives at 7 p.m. Oct. 7 at the Rococo Theatre, 140 N. 13th St. The program is free and open to the public.
Bechdel’s presentation is part of the Reading Series, sponsored by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Creative Writing Program, and the Department of English’s celebration “50 Years of LGBTQ Studies at UNL,” which recognizes the university’s groundbreaking role in developing and promoting LGBTQ literature and scholarship.
Bechdel’s darkly humorous graphic memoirs, astute writing and evocative drawing have forged an unlikely intimacy with a wide and disparate range of readers. For 25 years, Bechdel self-syndicated “Dykes to Watch Out For.” The award-winning comic strip has been called “one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period” by Ms. Magazine. From the strip was born the now famous “Bechdel Test,” which measures gender bias in film.
Her graphic novel, “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” was named the best book of the year by Time magazine, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and was adapted into a Broadway musical that has won five Tony Awards, including best musical. Bechdel was the recipient of a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2014, she received a MacArthur Genius Grant. In its citation, the MacArthur Foundation noted that Bechdel “is changing our notions of the contemporary memoir and expanding the expressive potential of the graphic form.”
