Picture + Panel: Freedom to Read

About the Event

This month, Picture + Panel explores censorship and banned books with Jarrett Dapier and Joel Christian Gill.

All BCAF events are free to attend.  If you wish to pay it forward, a $5 suggested donation helps sustain BCAF's comics advocacy and educational programming in the Greater Boston area.

More about Picture + Panel

Picture + Panel is a monthly conversation series that brings fantastic graphic novel creators to the Greater Boston area. Discover terrific authors and fascinating stories that combine text and art through conversational confabulation. Produced in partnership by the Boston Comic Arts Foundation, Porter Square Books, and the Boston Figurative Arts Center, Picture + Panel provides thought-provoking discussions for adults about this unique form of expression.

Book sales are provided at the event by Porter Square Books.

About the Creators

Jarrett Dapier is a Chicago-area librarian and the recipient of the John Phillip Immroth Award from the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Round Table for his work exposing book censorship in the Chicago Public Schools. He is the author of several award-winning picture books for children, one of which has faced several censorship attempts. Wake Now in the Fire, published by Ten Speed Graphic, is his most recent graphic novel.

Joel Christian Gill is an award winning cartoonist, historian, and educator. He wrote the words and drew the pictures in the series Strange Fruit and Tales of The Talented Tenth (Chicago Review Press), the award-winning work is a memoir chronicling how children deal with abuse and trauma: Fights: One Boy's Triumph Over Violence (Oni Press.), and the adaptation of Stamped from the Beginning a Graphic History of Racist Ideas in America by Dr. Ibram X Kendi (Ten Speed Press) June 2023. He is the Inaugural Chair of the MFA in Visual Narrative at Boston University.