Donald J. Sutherland Lecturer in the Liberal Arts and the Great Writers, Great Readings Lecture – Fall 2025 present
Lecture and Book Signing –
What It Is: Art and Everyday Life with Lynda Barry Award-wining Author and Artist
Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are very much alike. She lives in Wisconsin, where she is associate professor of art and Discovery Fellow at University of Wisconsin Madison.
Barry is the inimitable creator behind the seminal comic strip that was syndicated across North America in alternative weeklies for two decades, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddy. She is the author of The Freddie Stories, One! Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, and The Good Times are Killing Me, which was adapted as an off-Broadway play and won the Washington State Governor’s Award.
She has written four bestselling and acclaimed creative how-to graphic novels for Drawn & Quarterly, What It Is which won the Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Graphic Novel and R.R. Donnelly Award for highest literary achievement by a Wisconsin author; Picture This; Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor, and Making Comics, which received two Eisner Awards and appeared on numerous best of the year lists including the New York Times. In 2019 she received a MacArthur Genius Grant. (Drawn & Quarterly)
Select author’s titles will be available for purchase and signing. Admission is free and open to the public.