Celebrate the stories that connect us at The Word On The Street Toronto’s 2021 virtual festival of storytelling, ideas and imagination.
About this event:
The Word On The Street presents Illustrating Identity: Visual Language & Queer Stories, in partnership with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.
An image is worth 1,000 words, or so the saying goes. What does illustration bring to queer stories? There was a time where the only queer signifiers were subtle visual clues, and visual presentation is still a huge facet of people’s identities in the modern era. Join four modern illustrators as they discuss queer stories and storytelling, and how illustration serves to illuminate their work.
This panel will stream live Saturday, September 18 at 1pm ET.
Visit our website to see the full programming schedule!
Panelists
Gem Hall is an itinerant interdisciplinary artist of mixed Romani/British heritage currently based on the traditional, unceded land of the Musqueam, Squamish & Tsleil-Waututh Nations. With a background in DIY/zine culture, they use creative work as a means of survival, holding liminal spaces between worlds & ways of being.
Selena Goulding is a Canadian illustrator and comic book artist from Vancouver Island, currently living in Toronto. A graduate from the Sequential Arts Program at Toronto’s Max the Mutt Animation School, she is best known for her work on young adult indie comics such as Cobble Hill, publishing with 215 Ink. Susanna Moodie: Roughing It in the Bush was her first full-length graphic novel, based on a story by Carol Shields and published by Second Story Press in 2016. Her illustration work has also been showcased in the Dark Horse Comics anthology The Secret Loves of Geek Girls.
Shira Spector is a Jewish lesbian cartoonist who earned a BFA in Fibres (with Distinction) from Concordia University in Montreal. Her work has been widely anthologized and exhibited in Toronto where she is transplanted with her wife and son and a succession of rescue dogs. Red Rock Baby Candy (Fantagraphics) is her debut graphic memoir.
Sami Alwani is a cartoonist based in Toronto. His comics have appeared in Best American Comics, Vice, and the Fantagraphics anthology Now. He received a Doug Wright Award in 2018. His work was exhibited in the Canadian comics exhibition “This is Serious” at the Hamilton Art Gallery in 2019. His first book, The Pleasure of the Text, is out now with Conundrum Press.
