Maia Kobabe is a graduate of the first ever class in the MFA in Comics program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.. E is also the illustrator of Tom O’Bedlam, a single issue which was accepted into the Society of Illustrator’s Comic and Cartoon Art annual and nominated for an Ignatz Award in 2016. Maia’s short comics have been published on The Nib and widely anthologized. Before setting out to work freelance full-time, e worked for over ten years in libraries and now writes book reviews for Publisher’s Weekly. Gender Queer: A Memoir (Lion Forge) is eir first full-length book. In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
