Guillermo Batiz
Guillermo Batiz is a Mexican composer, producer and comics creator. His releases include Childs, Yui, Static Discos, 2006; donMoy, Enough About Me Let’s Talk About Me, Cyan Records, 2006; and On the Second Day, Solar Blood, Sicario, 2012.
Tamryn Bennett
Dr. Tamryn Bennett is an Australian writer and visual artist. She is Education Manager for The Red Room Company and tutors Creative Writing at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Since 2004, Tamryn has exhibited artists books and comics poetry in Sydney, Melbourne, Switzerland and Mexico. Her poetry, illustrations and essays have appeared in Five Bells, Nth Degree, Mascara Literary Review, THEthe Poetry, and English in Australia. tamrynbennett.com
Ezra Claverie
Ezra Claverie is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation examines Hollywood’s turn to comic-book superheroes since 2000, seeking both the motivations and functions of these films as the centerpieces of convergent media franchises. His other scholarship explores the rhetorical uses of authorship in the US film industries, the politics of fan speech communities, and the ways that gender norms inflect star image. His work has appeared in the journals Intensities and Literature/Film Quarterly, the edited collection Sexing the Look in Popular Visual Culture, and the blog Kritik.
Erik A. Evensen
Erik A. Evensen is Assistant Professor of Design and graduate faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Stout. His graphic novels include The Beast of Wolfe’s Bay and Gods of Asgard, and he is the illustrational coauthor of Super-powered Word Study. He holds an MFA in Design from The Ohio State University, where he later served as Design Foundations Coordinator. He studied drawing & painting at the University of New Hampshire and Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Oriana Gatta
Oriana Gatta is a rhetoric and composition Ph.D. candidate in Georgia State University’s English Department and a 2CI New & Emerging Media fellow. Her research interests include Visual Culture/Rhetoric, Postmodern and Postcolonial Feminist Theory, Comic Book Studies, Critical Pedagogy, New Media, and Digital Pedagogy, and her dissertation project addresses the visual rhetorical construction of ideology with/in comics.
Diana Green
Diana Green (BFA, MaLS) has been teaching for fifteen years. Her comic studio projects, The Surrealist Cowgirls and A Private Myth, proceed apace. She continues to present and publish, and her work in Icons of American Comics was published in 2013 by ABC-Clio. Recent publications include articles on homoerotic subtext in 1950s horror comics and the uses of apocalyptic themes in Alan Moore’s Promethea, as well as sixty entries in the forthcoming encyclopedia Comics Through Time. She is also a caregiver working with people with AIDS.
Terry Harpold
Terry Harpold is an Associate Professor of English, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Florida. With Daniel Compère and Volker Dehs, he is co-editor of the forthcoming Collectionner l’Extraordinaire, sonder l’Ailleurs. Essais sur Jules Verne en l’honneur de Jean-Michel Margot (Encrage Edition / L’Association des Amis du Roman Populaire, 2014).
Dale Jacobs
Dale Jacobs is the author of Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). His essays on comics include “More than Words: Comics as a Means of Teaching Multiple Literacies” in English Journal, “‘There are no rules. And here they are’: Scott McCloud’s Making Comics as a Multimodal Rhetoric” in Journal of Teaching Writing, “Marveling at The Man Called Nova: Comics as Multimodal Sponsors of Literacy” in College Composition and Communication, and “Multimodal Constructions of Self: Autobiographical Comics and the Case of Joe Matt’s Peepshow” in Biography. He is the editor of The Myles Horton Reader (University of Tennessee Press, 2003) and the co-editor (with Laura Micciche) of A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies (Boynton Cook/Heinemann, 2003).
Will Moore
Will Moore is pursuing an MA in Fiction at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. His teaching and research interests include writing pedogogies and multimodal texts, especially the graphic novel.
Derek Parker Royal
Derek Parker Royal is the founder and executive editor of Philip Roth Studies, as well as the co-host and co-editor of The Comics Alternative podcast and blog. His books include Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (Praeger, 2005), Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (Atlante, 2011, co-authored with Patrick Badonnel and Daniel Royot), Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Narrative (Purdue University Press, 2011), and upcoming books from Purdue University Press: Visualizing Jewish Narrative: Essays on Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels and the University Press of Mississippi: The Hernandez Brothers: Conversations and Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements in Recent Comics. He has guest edited eight different special issues of journals, covering topics such as Philip Roth’s later novels, contemporary Jewish narrative, multi-ethnic comics, superheroes and gender, politics and comics, and Woody Allen’s post-1990 films. His essays on American literature, comics, and film have appeared in a variety of edited book collections and scholarly journals.
Kerry Soper
Kerry Soper is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University. He does research on the history of comedy and satire in comic strips, television, film, and other popular media. His work has appeared in The Columbia Journal of American Studies, The Journal of American Studies, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Studies in American Humor, and The International Journal of Comic Art. He has published two book with the University Press of Mississippi: Garry Trudeau: Doonesbury and the Aesthetics of Satire, and We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire.
Carrye Kay Syma
Carrye Kay Syma is Associate Human Resources Librarian at Texas Tech University. Other publications include articles in College & Research Libraries News and Reference Services Review as well as numerous presentations and panels including the “Comic Arts Conference” at San Diego Comic-Con. She is the co-editor with Rob Weiner of Comics and Graphic Novels in the Classroom: The Educational Power of Sequential Art. She lives with her husband, two children and numerous pets.
Jeff Thoss
Jeff Thoss teaches English at the Free University of Berlin. He wrote his PhD thesis on metalepsis and has given talks and published papers on topics relating to narrative theory, intermediality, popular culture and comics studies. In addition, he has co-edited two collections of essays on metareference.
Robert G. Weiner
Robert G. Weiner is an Associate Humanities Librarian at Texas Tech University. He is the author of Marvel Graphic Novels: An Annotated Guide and the editor and co-editor of numerous books on comics, music, and film including Web-Spinning Heroics (with Robert Moses Peaslee), From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse (with John Cline), In the Peanut Gallery with Mystery Science Theater (with Shelley Barba), Captain American and the Struggle of the Superhero, The Storyteller Speaks: Rare and Different Fictions of the Grateful Dead (with Gary McKinney) and Comics and Graphic Novels in the Classroom (with Carrye Syma). He lives in Lubbock with several magical creatures known as prairie dogs.
Emily A. Wierszewski
Emily’s teaching and research is driven by her passion for graphic novels and comics. She’s an Associate Professor at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA, where she has been teaching courses like Seminar in Thinking and Writing, Writing for the Internet, and Media Aesthetics for four years. Her scholarship focuses on the use of multimodal texts like comics in the writing classroom, including projects focused on comics as rhetorical tools and strategies for assessing multimodal texts. While she can’t draw to save her life, her admiration for graphic illustrators is boundless.
Walton Wood
Walton Wood is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida. His current projects include mapping the narrative complexity of Blake’s Urizen trilogy and the more general study of science and literature, particularly the neurology of poetry.
Editors of this issue
Najwa Al-tabaa
Najwa H. Al-Tabaa is a graduate student in English at the University of Florida. She is the Co-Managing editor of ImageTexT and the President of the Graduate Comics Organization at UF. Her research focus is on contemporary literature, American literature, comics studies, war and trauma narratives, historical fiction, and popular culture.
James Bucky Carter
James Bucky Carter is an independent scholar with a Ph.D. in English Education from the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education (2008). Primary among his research interests are the intersections of comics and literacy. In 2010, he founded SANEjournal: sequential art narrative in education, an online, open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to scholarship and practitioner-based information on teaching comics. He has written and continues to produce multiple book chapters, articles, and lesson plans on the subject, and co-wrote Super-Powered Word Study: Teaching Words and Word Parts Through Comics with Erik Evensen in 2011. That text was a finalist for the Next Generation Independent Book Awards. He wrote for and edited the ebook Rationales for Teaching Graphic Novels (2010), and his award-winning edited collection Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels: Page by Page, Panel by Panel (2007) remains a best-seller for NCTE. Current projects include work intertwining comics, young adult/new adult literature, and school ecologies to facilitate “safe spaces” for all students; comics scholarship as it relates to the American Southwest and Borderlands; and investigating comics’ role in culturally-relevant curricula. As well, he spends significant time fighting current corporate education reforms and Common Core State Standards in hopes of facilitating K12 transformations with students’ best interests at heart. He has taught comics-related courses at Washington State University, the University of Texas at El Paso, and the University of Southern Mississippi. Follow him on twitter @JamesBuckyCarte.