Alison Bechdel
Visiting Creative Nonfiction Writer, Summer 2016
Profile
Alison Bechdel created the countercultural comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran in lesbian and gay publications from 1983 to 2008.
In 2006 Bechdel began to gain a wider readership with the publication of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. This graphic memoir about her relationship with her closeted gay father was named Best Book of the year by Time Magazine, and has been turned into a Tony award-winning Broadway musical. Bechdel’s second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, explores her relationship with her mother through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. Bechdel has drawn comics for The New Yorker, Slate, McSweeney’s, the New York Times Book Review, and Granta, among many other publications. She is a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship.