For the Love of Graphic Novels: A Roundtable on Inclusive Stories
Alicia Abdul is a high school librarian in Albany, NY, and advises for their Anime Club. She’s served on or chaired several YALSA book committees, presents at local, state, and national conferences on books, programs, and graphic novels, and recently became an adjunct for two graduate programs on young adult literature. She also reviews books for SLJ and SLC. If it’s not books, she’s baking or buying dresses.
Sara Alfageeh is a Jordanian American illustrator and creative director in San Francisco. She’s passionate about history, nuances in visual storytelling, and the spaces where art and identity intersect. She’s known for her work for Marvel Comics, Star Wars, and children’s publishing. While that’s cool and all, she really just wants to draw girls with swords. Visit her online at www.sara-alfa.com.
Nadia Shammas is an Arab-American writer born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She is best known for being the writer and co-creator of SQUIRE, a YA Middle Eastern fantasy graphic novel (HarperCollins 2022), with Sara Alfageeh. She’s also the creator and curator of CORPUS: A Comic Anthology of Bodily Ailments.
Dr. Gwen Athene Tarbox is a professor in the Department of English at Western Michigan University, where she teaches comics studies, children’s and YA literature, and American popular culture. Her monograph, Children’s and YA Comics, was released by Blooomsbury Academic in 2020, and she has co-edited, with Dr. Michelle Ann Abate, Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays (University of Mississippi Press, 2017). Currently, Dr. Tarbox is writing a monograph on contemporary middle grade comics.
