Queer Method Conference Keynote

Alison Bechdel is the internationally acclaimed author of the graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a New York Times bestseller that was named Best Book of 2006 by Time magazine and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which ran for 25 years, has been syndicated in over 50 newspapers and translated into many languages. In 2008 Houghton Mifflin published the compilation volume The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.

Following publication of The Essential Dykes, Bechdel began devoting herself full time to autobiographical work, producing in 2012 her second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama, which The New York Times called "exhilarating." She is also editor of Best American Comics 2011. Her work has appeared in Granta, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, and McSweeney’s, among other venues.

In Spring 2012 she was the Mellon Residential Fellow for Arts and Practice at the University of Chicago's Richard and Mary L. Gray Center. In 2012-13 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which she used to work on her third family memoir. This inquiry into the nature of family itself will draw on such sources as Margaret Mead, Family Systems Therapy, and the complex sibling relationships between and among Alice, Henry, and William James.