Derf Backderf

Derf Backderf is a bestselling, award-winning writer and cartoonist. His comic strip The City debuted in 1990 and appeared in over 140 publications, including The Village Voice, Chicago Reader and The Los Angeles Reader. He retired the strip in 2013 to focus on books. His graphic novels include Punk Rock & Trailer Parks, Trashed (which earned him an Eisner Award), and the international bestseller, My Friend Dahmer. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard gunned down unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. In a deadly barrage of 67 shots, 4 students were killed and 9 shot and wounded. It was the day America turned guns on its own children. A few days prior, 10-year-old Derf Backderf saw those same Guardsmen patrolling his nearby hometown, sent in by the governor to crush a trucker strike. For Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, conducted extensive interviews and research to explore the lives of these four young people and the events of those four days in May, when the country seemed on the brink of tearing apart.  Fifty years later those deaths remains a moving and troubling story about the price of dissent— a timely reminder considering recent events. In a starred review the Library Journal called it ” An incendiary corrective to the myths and misconceptions surrounding these events and a memorial to the lives lost or forever altered that should be required reading for all Americans.”