Drawing on the Past: Jewish Graphic Narratives with Sol Brager
Presented in partnership with UW-Madison Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies Conney Project on Jewish Arts and the UW-Madison Center for Visual Cultures.
Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory is an analog inkwash comic about situating family Holocaust history in the context of ongoing colonialism, resisting trauma narratives that excuse the violences of the present, and figuring out whether the ghosts you’ve invented to keep you company are really the ghosts you need.
In conversation with Erika Meitner.
Solomon Brager
Solomon J. Brager is a cartoonist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Their comics and research have appeared in The Nib, Jewish Currents, ArtForum, World War III Illustrated, Pinko Magazine, Refract Journal, and The New Inquiry, among other publications. They hold a PhD from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and teach in history, media, and gender studies.
Erika Meitner
Erika Meitner is the author of six books of poems, including Ideal Cities, which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner; Copia; and Holy Moly Carry Me, which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her newest book, Useful Junk, was published by BOA Editions in April of 2022. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry, Orion, The Believer, and elsewhere.
Other honors include fellowships from MacDowell, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Blue Mountain Center, and Bethany Arts Community. She was also the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, and is currently a 2022 Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellow. Meitner is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.