BIO

Glynnis Fawkes is a cartoonist and archaeological illustrator. Her comics for MuthaMagazine were nominated for an Ignatz Award at the Small Press Expo in 2016. Recently her work has appeared on The New Yorker.com and in the magazine. Her latest book, Reign of Crumbs, is available from Kilgore Books. Her Greek Diary was shortlisted for the Slate Cartoonist Studio Prize for Best Online Comic and won a silver medal at the Society of Illustrators MoCCA Arts Festival in 2017. In April 2016, her book Alle Ego also won the MoCCA Arts Festival Award for Excellence. She has illustrated several academic books (Three Stones Make a Wall, Kinyras: the Divine Lyre, The Book of Greek and Roman Folktales, Legends, and Myths) and worked extensively as illustrator on archaeological projects in Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Lebanon, and Israel. A Fulbright Fellowship to Cyprus allowed her to publish Archaeology Lives in Cyprus (Hellenic Bank, Nicosia 2001), a book of paintings, and Cartoons of Cyprus (Moufflon Publications, Nicosia, 2001). She was named among the Best American Comics Notables in 2012 and 2013 and won a Sequential Artists Workshop grant in 2013. She lives in Burlington with her music archaeologist/classics professor husband and two children.


IN PRAISE OF GLYNNIS FAWKES

Readers will find Fawkes more than succeeds in her diary-endeavor. Her trips abroad are euphoric and sometimes stressful. Her kids are frustrating and funny. Time with her mom is a particular kind of painful, and a reminder that none of it will last. Occasional landscapes and other interstitial drawings give readers a breath and an idea of the breadth of Fawkes’ talent. A substantive, tender work of recording and remembering.

– Booklist

The collection reaches an emotional climax with “The House on Thurman Street,” which describes a visit to her parents at her childhood home in Portland, Ore. She contrasts the reminiscences the visit stirs in her with her mother’s devastating memory loss due to Alzheimer’s, a disease Fawkes realizes can be hereditary. “The jaws of my memory want to close on this house so hard,” she concludes. Combining small moments that will ring true for many readers, Fawkes uncovers big themes in this funny-sad, satisfying mosaic.

– Publishers Weekly

I don’t know if I’ve been more charmed by a book in quite some time. Glynnis Fawke’s Persephone’s Garden is actually a compilation, a sketchbook diary that functions as a kind of graphic memoir when fully assembled. The composition of this book is a delight. We get to witness a progression of styles based both on necessity and choice. Some pages feature intricate designs, while others are quick drawings that capture brief moments incredibly well. To have capture them another way would likely have lost the heart of those moments. It is such a beautiful book because it isn’t overthought; it has a gift in that it wasn’t actually composed to be what it is. It’s a true diary, not a memoir. A collection of life, it functions as a natural reflection on raising kids in settings that are fairly unique, such as an archeological dig in Cyprus, but with universal situations like temper tantrums over stopping for ice cream. The real beauty of this book is towards the end where both Fawkes art and narrative seem to refine and coalesce. Her children are older, but the trials don’t evaporate. She channels the mother-daughter relationship as well as I’ve seen in any form, the simultaneous “pay attention to me get away from me” vibe of adolescence captured nearly perfectly on the page.

– Panel Patter

The collection showcases Fawkes’s versatility with different styles. The brisk, four-panel template of her “daily diary” comics appears alongside the more measured and detail-rich look of her longer pieces. The comics strike different notes that will resound in different ways with different readers. Relayed as short segments set in a variety of settings and situations, Persephone’s Garden is an intimate graphic autobiography of a most unusual kind.

– Foreword

Fawkes captures the beauty of the Grecian landscape: the bustle of busy ports, quiet villages baking under the summer sun, and days filled with sightseeing, swimming in the ocean, and lazy pleasure-seeking—interspersed with inevitable bouts of travel fatigue and ordinary family strife. The result is a work that’s more vivid, immersive, and entertaining than any vacation slide show could ever be.

– The Comics Journal

Fawkes has written about her children before, but much of her work tends to focus on either mythology or archaeology. Not in this book, as Fawkes expertly and honestly captures the ways in which children (and pre-teens in particular) are both terrible and wonderful.

– High-Low

Fawkes is an award-winning cartoonist who hasn’t really gotten that big PR breakout yet. Excellent pieces like this should change that. I think any woman who has a mother or is a mother will relate to the intense body scrutiny that little girls have for their moms — at least I do!

– Comics Beat

The control of her other work, like Alles Ego, is replaced with a simplicity and an immediacy that makes these comics feel lived in. It’s hard to say which of Fawkes’s styles I prefer more.

– Sequential State


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