Stanford Graphic Novel Project

Students

Candice Kim is an MD student who’s also pursuing a PhD in education. She didn’t start dreaming of becoming a writer until two years ago. Since then, she’s performed her work in New York City and San Francisco, led creative writing workshops in Portland and Napa Valley, and published articles about the value of the medical humanities for training future physicians. She dresses in all black and secretly wishes she could wear leather pants every day (but they’re really bad in the summer).

Katherine Liu is a junior majoring in computer science. She spends a lot of time drawing, and in high school she wanted to start a webcomic but never got around to it. She used to wish that she took the Stanford Graphic Novel Project class in freshman year, but she is glad that she made this book with these wonderful people. Find her art at dysphania.tumblr.com or instagram.com/poxei.

Lily Nilipour is an English major and plastic lizard collector. She does many useless things with her free time, such as working on a book that currently has more than 800 uniquely drawn and named cats. Practicing the piano, playing tennis, and doing crosswords keep her sane. In her recent writing she’s found herself to be vaguely obsessed with the sea.

Sarah Shourd is an award-winning freelance journalist and producer based in Oakland, California. Her work combines rigorous journalism with the tools of creative nonfiction. Shourd’s three-year investigation into solitary confinement took her to over a dozen prisons across the United States and resulted in a book (Hell is a Very Small Place) and a play (The BOX). She has written for dozens of publications and coauthored a memoir about her own imprisonment, A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran. Currently a 2019 JSK Knight Fellow at Stanford, in her free time Shourd enjoys redwood trees, popcorn, and irreverence. Sarahshourd.com.

Lucy Zhu likes to draw….. a lot, I guess. She is majoring in computer science, so you can find her sobbing over a program because it took her three hours to realize that she forgot to add a parenthesis. If you get her boba tea, she’ll be your friend for life >:3. You can find her stuff at hexagonsgalore.tumblr.com!

Peter DiCampo is a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford and an award-winning photojournalist whose work has taken him to more than 30 countries. He is most known for cocreating the viral Everyday Africa project through which he and a collective of photographers work to broaden perspective of the continent beyond the usual media stereotypes. Secretly though, he wishes he could just write comics and listen to metal all day. peterdicampo.com

Nik Wesson is a current sophomore at Stanford University studying film and media studies and art practice. She enjoys drawing, reading, and watching television. However, the thing she enjoys most is sitting down to create a great story.

Elena Kamas is always having a party and knows that ducks wearing shoes transcend all other mediums of humor. She is studying mechanical engineering, but would rather be playing Ultimate, drinking ginger beer, hanging out with totem poles, or hiding Easter eggs. She hopes to invent something impressive and useful one day, but for now she is content with sewing stuffed animals for her friends. @stitchesgetbitchez

Serena Zhang is a sophomore majoring in film and media studies and minoring in creative writing. When she’s not writing and dreaming of directing the next Oscar-winning film starring an all-Asian American cast, you can find her passed out in a coma-like slumber or injecting Sriracha sauce directly into her veins. Check out her work at xiaosez.weebly.com.

Sharon Tran is a sophomore majoring in English and minoring in human rights. When not thinking about writing, she can be found either acting onstage or working behind the scenes for an Asian American Theater Project production. Her hobbies include looking for chips and salsa, making lists, and wearing clothing with colors that match the graphic novel’s color palette.

Danial Shadmany is a sophomore majoring in physics and minoring in creative writing. He consumes what most people would probably call an unhealthy amount of literature. When not banging his head against his fluid dynamics textbook, he’s writing. He doesn’t have a website to list here, because he’s suspicious of the internet.

Teaching Assistants

Bae is still a work in progress. Some fun facts: They can play music with their teeth, they have never been stung by a bee, they are lactose intolerant and allergic to cats (but that doesn’t stop them from living life to the fullest). They were a student in SGNP’s 2016-2017 cohort, which produced Luisa. This year, they were a TA for the class. Check out their portfolio, also very much a work in progress, at designed-by-bae.com

Luke Soon-Shiong was a TA for this project for a hot second, but then he had to leave to do a marketing job in Oakland. Outside of comics, Luke’s an anthropologist who loves how buckwild and crazy the internet is. Luke was also part of the team that worked on Luisa, SGNP’s previous book. You can visit their website lukemakes.art to find podcasts, paintings, prints, more comics, and an ongoing ethnography of the internet. Luke is a part of the Splorse artist collective and visual radio station at splorse.com. Thanks for reading this good good book.

Instructors

Scott Hutchins is the Jones-Draper Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University. His work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, the Arkansas International, The Rumpus, The New York Times, San Francisco, Catamaran, and Esquire, and has been set to music. His novel A Working Theory of Love was a San Francisco Chronicle and Salon Best Book of 2012.

Shimon Tanaka is a lecturer in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford. He has received fellowships from the Stegner Program, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Asian Cultural Council. His fiction has won prizes from and appeared in a number of literary magazines and the anthology Best New American Voices. He is at work on a novel and a short-story collection.

Andy Warner is a comics journalist and teacher. His book, Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, was a New York Times Bestseller and his comics have been published by Slate, The United Nations Human Rights Council, KQED, The Nib, American Public Media, The Showtime Network, The Center for Constitutional Rights, and BuzzFeed. His new book, This Land is My Land, will be published in May, 2019. He makes his comics in a garret room in South Berkeley and comes from the sea.