The 103nd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, October 14, 2014 at 8 pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. Please note 8 pm starting time.

Presentation: Anya Ulinich in conversation with Olga Gershenson.

Anya Ulinich will present her graphic novel, Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, which the Publishers’ Weekly called “an honest and absorbing tragicomedy about love, sex, and everything that goes with them.” She will discuss how she went from being a painter to becoming a fiction writer to writing a graphic novel, and the steep learning curves along the way. She will also talk about her process, and the challenges of using autobiographical material in fiction and visual storytelling.

Anya Ulinich grew up in Moscow, Russia, and immigrated to Arizona when she was seventeen. She holds an MFA in visual arts from the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Petropolis (Viking, 2007), and Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, a graphic novel (Penguin, 2014). Ulinich’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Zoetrope: All-Story, n+1, and PEN America Journal. She teaches creative writing at the New School and lives in Brooklyn with her two daughters.

Olga Gershenson has been Jewish in Russia, Russian in Israel, and finally became an academic in the US, where she is Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Gesher: Russian Theatre in Israel (2005) and The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (2013), as well as an editor of Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009). She has published widely on Jewish and Israeli films, and she is now working on her own film.

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