CCA students, faculty, and staff are invited to an artist talk and Q&A with graphic novelist, Maia Kobabe (e, em, eir). Maia will be discussing the creation of eir critically-acclaimed debut graphic novel, GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR, and how art school prepared em for a creative career. 

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. Eir first full length book, GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR, came out from Lion Forge Comics/Oni Press in May 2019. GENDER QUEER was a winner of an Alex Award and Stonewall Honor in 2020, and nominated for an Ignatz Award and the Best Graphic Novels for Teens List from YALSA in 2019. It was also the most challenged book in the United States in 2021. It recently received a new hardcover edition and has been translated into Spanish, Polish, Czech, French, and Italian with Norwegian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Japanese and Korean forthcoming.

Maia's short comics have been published in The Nib, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and included in the anthologies ALPHABET (2015), TABULA IDEM (2017), MINE! (2018), GOTHIC TALES OF HAUNTED LOVE (2018), THE SECRET LOVES OF GEEKS (2018), FASTER THAN LIGHT Y’ALL (2018), ADVANCED DEATH SAVES (2019), HOW TO WAIT (2019), SHOUT OUT (2019), ROLLED AND TOLD (2019), THEATER OF TERROR (2019), BE GAY, DO COMICS (2020) and THE MOST IMPORTANT COMIC BOOK ON EARTH: STORIES TO SAVE THE WORLD (2021). E has also illustrated the YA prose novel WE ARE THE FIRE, WE ARE THE ASHES written by Joy McCullough (2021). Maia's next book is SAACHI'S STORIES, a graphic novel co-written with Lucky Srikumar, due out from Scholastic Graphix in spring 2025.

Before setting out to work freelance full-time, Maia worked for over ten years in libraries. E has been self-publishing comics and zines since 2010, and has attended over fifty comic conventions in that time. Eir work focuses on gender, sexuality, queerness, and pop culture fandom.