Check out some more of our featured guests in our penultimate update on this year's festival!
See you all in two weeks!
Lynette Richards has been cartooning her whole life. She chose stained glass as her professional medium because it was both a trade and an art. She was fully aware, too, that stained glass windows have used sequential narration for over 1000 years, and are essentially, early graphic novels!
As a Craft Nova Scotia Master Artisan, Lynette is proud to have been selected to create large public art installations for the first Pride Library in Canada (UWO London ON), and the ArQuives (formerly the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto). Lynette lives and works in Terence Bay Nova Scotia, where she owns and operates Rose Window Stained Glass and serves on the Board of Directors of the SS Atlantic Heritage Park and Society.
Jesse Jacobs is a cartoonist living in London, Ontario. His comics contain an affiliation with psychedelia and alternative realities. His books By This Shall You Know Him, Safari Honeymoon, and Crawl Space, have been translated into several languages. He is debuting his latest work, New Pets, published by the Italian Hollow Press.
Nick Maandag was born in 1982 in Mississauga, Ontario, and is now based in Toronto. He started making zines in his late teens, and has since produced a number of comics and graphic novels. His new novel, Harvey Knight’s Odyssey, is published by Drawn and Quarterly.
J. Torres is a Filipino-born Canadian comic book writer. He is perhaps best known for his run on DC Comics’ Teen Titans Go! series, the Forest of Reading Honour Book Planet Hockey, the Junior Library Guild and TD Summer Reading Club title Bigfoot Boy, and Lola: A Ghost Story, recipient of an Aesop Accolade from the American Folklore Society. Stealing Home is a 2023 Silver Birch Fiction Award nominee. Torres was born in Manila and raised in Montreal where he was educated at McGill University. He is married, has two sons and currently resides in a suburb of Toronto.
David Namisato lives in Toronto and started drawing pictures professionally in 2005.. A year after returning to Canada, David kicked things off by drawing pictures for articles in the children’s magazine Know and, later, its sibling publication, Yes. David then went on to draw the art for the comic series Gabe and Allie in Race Through Time for the children’s history magazine Kayak, which showcased major moments in Canadian history. J. Torres and David are collaborating on a graphic novel, Stealing Home, and it is David’s first graphic novel for children.
Raised in the 1970s by a children’s librarian and a sex therapist, Cory grew up to be a sex educator, author, and queer person who smiles a lot when they talk. Coryteaches and talks with young people, adults, and professionals across North America about gender, sexuality, disability, and more. Their books for young people and families, co-written with Fiona Smyth, have been called “the books about sex that every family should read” by the New York Times and include the ALA Stonewall Honor Book Sex Is a Funny Word, and most recently You Know, Sex.
Fly has been part of the Squatter & Activist Community in the Lower East Side since the late 80s. She is a visual artist, writer, musician, teacher and archivist. Fly has worked as a professional illustrator and comics artist since the early 80s. She has had her illustrations and comics appear in countless magazines, books and online forums, as well as having 2 books of her work published. She has been teaching comics art, zine-making, animation and activist art at the Lower Eastside Girls Club since 2014. In 2015 she founded the Annual LESGC Girls Comix Fest.
Her Personal Zine Collection (over 2000 zines) was recently acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The MIA had an exclusive exhibition of the FZA (Fly Zine Archive) from July 2021 – April 22 2022. Fly’s personal archive has very recently been acquired by Columbia University.
Paul Gilligan writes and draws the internationally syndicated comic strip Pooch Café, which has been twice nominated for best strip by the National Cartoonist Society. He’s authored a series of early chapter books published by Macmillan called King of the Mole People, as well as the recently published Pluto Rocket: New in Town, published by Tundra Books, the first in a series of early-reader graphic novels about a friendly alien and a wise-cracking pigeon.
----
This year, TCAF will take place at the Toronto Reference Library from April 28th - 30th. There will also be a digital marketplace and digital events from April 21st - May 7th. As always, tickets for TCAF and related TCAF events are FREE. Some pre-registration is required for online activities and will be announced beforehand.