Cartoonist and graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel is the creator of the long-running countercultural comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, which realistically captured the lives of women in a lesbian community and garnered a devoted and diverse following. From this pioneering work emerged the “Bechdel Test,” now an international benchmark for assessing gender bias in film. Her gifts as a storyteller became more universally recognized with the publication of her book-length graphic memoirs. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, is a nuanced depiction of her childhood spent in an artistic family and her relationship with her father, and has been developed into a Broadway musical. Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, explores her relationship with her mother as seen through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. Striking for its conceptual depth and complexity in structure as well as for the deft use of allusion and reference, her work is changing our notions of the contemporary memoir and expanding the expressive potential of the graphic form. A 2014 MacArthur Fellow, she is currently at work on a book entitled The Secret to Superhuman Strength.