Prairie Lights

Please join us at 4:30 at Prairie Lights with graphic novelists Joe Sacco and MariNaomi, who will meet fans and sign copies of their books in a special event sponsored by the University of Iowa Obermann Center as part of the Racial Reckoning Through Comics Mellon-Sawyer Seminar! All are welcome!

Joe Sacco is a Maltese-American comic artist known for Palestine (1993), Safe Area Gorazde (2000),  Footnotes in Gaza (2009), and Paying the Land (2020) among many other award-winning works. A journalist by trade, he uses his drawing and narrative skills to provide a mosaic of testimonies that problematize mainstream narratives on genocide, political violence, migration and crimes against humanity in the Middle East, the Balkans, Southeast Asia and North America. He has won the American Book Award (1996), the Eisner Award (2001), the Eagle award and the Time magazine “Best Comic” award (2000) among many other nominations and recognitions.

MariNaomi (they/them) is the award-winning author and illustrator of Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22 (Harper Perennial, 2011), Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories (2dcloud/Uncivilized Books, 2014), Turning Japanese (2dcloud, 2016), I Thought YOU Hated ME (Retrofit Comics, 2016), the Life on Earth trilogy (Graphic Universe, 2018-2020), Dirty Produce (Workman Publishing, 2021), and the upcoming collage-comics memoir I Thought You Loved Me (Fieldmouse Press, 2023). Their work has appeared in over eighty print publications and has been featured on websites such as The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, The Washington Post, LA Times, The Rumpus, LA Review of Books, Midnight Breakfast and BuzzFeed.  Their comics have been translated into French (Devenir Japonaise, Editions IMHO, 2021) and Russian.