The following piece was commissioned as part of the Illustrated PEN‘s State of Emergency feature, intended to bring forward the voices and stories of communities whose concerns and lives may be most at risk under the new administration. Our hope is that the stories created for this series will help empower and inspire people to stand up and speak out and to begin to repair what’s been so thoroughly broken.

The comics of Dylan Edwards have been featured in several notable anthologies, including the Ignatz Award-winning QU33R (Northwest Press, 2013), the Lambda Literary Award-winning No Straight Lines (Fantagraphics, 2012), and the Lambda Literary Award-winning Beyond Anthology (Beyond Press, 2015). He is the author of Transposes (Northwest Press, 2012), a graphic novel about queer-identified transmasculine people. In 2016, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association honored him with their Award for Outstanding Transgender Coverage.