Tigermedia - Exploring Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese-American
Exploring Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese-American
Date: October 26th, 2022
Duration:
55m:7s
Join Laura Gao, author and illustrator of "Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese-American," who discusses their experiences around the themes of trauma, remembrance, and compassion. What are some things that inspired the creation of "Messy Roots," and how might readers be able to draw inspiration from Gao’s journey and story as presented in her debut graphic memoir? Gao is a queer artist, author, bread lover, and nomadic traveler. Originally from Wuhan, China, Laura immigrated to Dallas, Texas, and began their art career by doodling on Pokémon cards, and later featured in NPR, the MOCA in New York City, and most notably, their parents' fridge. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Gao worked as a Product Manager in San Francisco before April 2020, when in response to anti-Asian racism and rampant misinformation about Wuhan, they published a webcomic, “The Wuhan I Know,” on Twitter where it went viral and attracted attention from several book publishers. The comic inspired their bestselling debut graphic memoir, “Messy Roots,” which was published in March 2022 with HarperCollins.
This program is part of the 2022-23 Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center (KHC) and National Endowment for the Humanities Colloquium, “Trauma, Remembrance and Compassion” and is aligned with the KHC’s original exhibition, “The Concentration Camps: Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide” (https://khc.qcc.cuny.edu/camps/). The event was organized by the KHC at Queensborough Community College and was co-sponsored by the Asian American/Asian Research Institute at CUNY; the QCC Creative Writing Club; the Ray Wolpow Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at Western Washington University; the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College; and the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University. For more information about the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center, please visit https://khc.qcc.cuny.edu