Harrowing Histories: Illustrated Personal Accounts

Joseph Sieracki is currently teaching in a suburb of Cleveland. A Letter To Jo is his first graphic novel. Kelly Williams makes comics. Sometimes writes, just about always draws. He has done work with Dark Horse, BOOM!, IDW, Image, Alterna and more. Best known for the graphic novels The Cabinet and Metaphase along with his work in Eerie and Creepy.  As Leonard fights on the frontlines of World War II, memories of Josephine and home help keep him alive. As Josephine contends with life, family, and work in Cleveland, letters from Leonard sustain her. But official censorship forces him to leave out much of the most significant action he sees. Finally, with the war coming to an end, Leonard is able to tell his full story. In a quietly beautiful letter to Josephine, Leonard writes of the loneliness he felt, the camaraderie he experienced, and the terrible violence he witnessed. Josephine and Leonard’s grandson, Joseph Sieracki, has expanded the letter into a moving tale of a young man’s fears and bravery far from home. Brought to heart-wrenching life by the paintbrushes of Kelly Williams, A Letter to Jo (Top Shelf Productions) is at once a tender love story and harrowing battlefield memoir. School Library Journal praised Sieracki as he “effortlessly adapts his grandfather’s letters into a narrative that feels both intimate and sweeping… Williams captures the desolation of the battlefields and the bloodcurdling violence of government-sanctioned killing. But through it all, the love story conquers the darkness so hauntingly

Emei Burell is a cartoonist and illustrator from Sweden. Her work has also appeared in Adventure Time Comics, Hip Hop Family Tree, Studygroupcomics, and a number of publications in Sweden, Denmark, the UK and Chile. As part of Mao’s mandated Great Leap Forward, an entire generation’s most formative years in China took place in remote rural areas when city-kids were sent to become rusticated youth. In We Served the People (Archaia) cartoonist Emei Burell breathes new life into the stories her mother shared with her of growing up during mid-1960s Communist China. Her mother recounts how she ended up as one of the few truck-driving women during the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside movement, which sought to increase agricultural outreach and spur social and ideological change amongst youth. Burell’s stunning illustrations honor her mother’s courage, strength, and determination during a decade of tremendous political upheaval, where millions of lives were lost, and introduces us to a young Burell in a new era of self-discovery.

Sarah Mirk is a multimedia journalist whose work focuses on telling nuanced, human-focused stories. She is an editor of The Nib and the former online editor of national feminism and pop-culture magazine Bitch Media. In January 2002, the United States sent a group of Muslim men they suspected of terrorism to a prison in Guantánamo Bay. They were the first of roughly 780 prisoners who would be held there. 40 inmates still remain. Eighteen years later, very few of them have been ever charged with a crime. In Guantanamo Voices (Abrams ComicArts), journalist Sarah Mirk and her team of diverse, talented graphic novel artists tell the stories of ten people whose lives have been shaped and affected by the prison, including former prisoners, lawyers, social workers, and service members. Kirkus Reviews called it “An eye-opening, damning indictment of one of America’s worst trespasses that continues to this day.”