Smash Pages Q&A: MK Czerwiec

The editor of ‘Menopause: A Comic Treatment’ discusses the recently released anthology, her approach to Graphic Medicine and what she’d like to do next.

MK Czerwiec is a cartoonist, teacher and nurse. She is the co-author of The Graphic Medicine Manifesto, and the cartoonist behind the graphic memoir Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371. She also runs the website GraphicMedicine.org.

Czerwiec’s new project is Menopause: A Comic Treatment, just published by Pennsylvania State University Press. The book is the first anthology Czerwiec edited, and she assembled an incredible lineup of comics creators and scholars to tell stories about the complicated personal experience and medical concerns of menopause. Alternately educational and funny and enlightening and heartening, the book finds a way to encompass many facets and experiences and perspectives, and in doing so, to offer a new possibility for people to understand what menopause is and what it can mean on so many levels.

Czerwiec and I met at last year’s Queers and Comics conference in New York City, and we spoke recently about her work, Graphic Medicine, and what comics can do to help medical professionals and patients learn about illness.

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