Congratulations to Linda Warley!

Congratulations to Dr. Linda Warley of UWaterloo English. At this year’s meeting of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, her co-edited collection Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives received the Gabrielle Roy Prize for studies in Canadian and Quebec literatures. It includes chapters by not one but three UWaterloo English alumni. Kevin Ziegler’s “Public Dialogues: Intimacy and Judgment in Canadian Confessional Comics” opens the collection; Kathleen Venema contributed “Untangling the Graphic Power of Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me“; and Andrew Deman is the author of “‘Oh Well’: My New York Diary, Autographics, and the Depiction of Female Sexuality in Comics.”

Last year’s recipient was also from UWaterloo English, Dr. Winfried Siemerling.

The jury writes:

The individual essays work to articulate the significance of the visual medium for the representation of the vulnerable self in Canadian graphic autobiographies, and range in subject from Seth and Chester Brown, to Sara Leavitt’s heartbreaking narrative about her mother’s death, to Julie Doucet’s early feminist autobiography, My New York Diary. The collection as a whole tells the story of how this important and comparatively new genre evolved in Canada, introducing historically important publications and publishing houses as well as individual cartoonists. The book design is attractive and spacious, and the accompanying illustrations beautifully produced. Canadian Graphic is both a stimulating read and an important scholarly achievement