The Eisner winners were recently announced, and Tillie Walden ’16 won Best Graphic Album—New Material for Are You Listening? (First Second), a magical realism story about two women on a road trip through Texas. Bea is on the run and joins Lou in this intimate and emotionally soaring story about friendship, grief, and healing. This is Tillie’s second Eisner. Spinning (First Second, 2017), her coming-of-age memoir about finding her own voice while ice skating and going to an all-girls high school, won the 2018 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.

Tillie Walden is a 2016 graduate of The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) and starting this year has joined the faculty at CCS, where they will be teaching with Jason Lutes this fall. In 2016, her graphic novel End of Summer (US: Retrofit, UK: Avery Hill Publishing, 2016) won the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Artist. The same year, she won another Promising New Talent Ignatz Award for her second graphic novel I Love This Part (US: Retrofit, UK: Avery Hill Publishing, 2016), which was also nominated for the 2016 Eisner Award for Best Single Issue/One-Shot. And her third 2016 graphic novel, A City Inside (US: Retrofit, UK: Avery Hill Publishing, 2016) won the Broken Frontier Award for Best One-Shot. In 2017, On a Sunbeam was nominated for the Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic. When First Second published On a Sunbeam (First Second, 2018), it won the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Tags: Are You Listening, Eisner Award, First Second, Graphic Novel, Tillie Walden