November 1, 2019

Event date: –

Cathy G. Johnson is a cartoonist, printmaker and arts educator. Her graphic novels include Jeremiah (One Percent Press), Gorgeous (Koyama Press) and The Breakaways (First Second). She has also published numerous smaller works with publishers such as Czap Books, Youth in Decline, and Silver Sprocket, as well as self-publishing. She is also a printmaker, regularly working in the feminist art collective studio, Dirt Palace, in Providence, RI.

Cathy teaches art classes and workshops throughout New England, creating lessons for Pre-K to 12th graders and beyond. She wrote her thesis on the benefits of teaching comics in visual arts education. She is also the co-host for the comics scholarship podcast, Drawing a Dialogue.

Reviews of The Breakaways:

• “Readers will be sorry there are no additional volumes planned to flesh out these characters further.”—Kirkus Reviews
• “Johnson’s graphic novel will resonate with readers who are figuring out who they are and where they belong.”—Publisher’s Weekly
• “The team dynamics are an unsettlingy realistic web of the sorts of behavior that Rosalind Wiseman chronicled in her Queen Bees and Wannabes book and the movie Mean Girls turned into pop culture gold.”—J. Caleb Mozzocco, School Library Journal
• “I am especially glad I have The Breakaways as, for the first time in my five years as an elementary school librarian, I have a fifth grade student who confided in me that she is gay and struggling to talk about it with her friends. I am grateful that I have this stellar book to put in her hands…”—Tanya Turek, Books 4 Your Kids