Lynda Barry: Seriously Multitalented is a proposed volume in the new series Critical Approaches to Comics Artists at the University Press of Mississippi. Hillary Chute correctly labels Barry, now author of 18 books, as "one of America's seriously multitalented artists" (57, Outside the Box); Susan E. Kirtley describes her work as "uncompromising and multifaceted" (188, Lynda Barry: Girlhood Through the Looking Glass). This collection of original essays aims to capture the range and depth of Barry's work, from the artistic and the political to the pedagogical. Contributors are invited to consider Barry's contributions to the comic medium's history, development, and reception; her cultural, contextual, and aesthetic influences and resonances; her accounts or elisions of class, race, gender, sexuality, and disability; her negotiations of childhood, memory, and trauma; her relationships to or distances from literature, art history, film, and other contiguous disciplines; her participation in or detachment from wider social and commercial currents for comics in popular culture; her own pedagogical praxis; the place of her work in contemporary classrooms or other teaching environments. Creative and artistic engagements with Barry's work will also be considered for this volume, e.g. original comics, illustrations, or other artistic responses, in dialogue with Barry's own commitments to flexibility and fluidity.

Please send a 500-1000 word abstract or description of creative/artistic response, CV, and contact information to Jane Tolmie, jane.tolmie@queensu.ca by January 30, 2015.