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Lillian E. Smith Graphic Memoir
Lillian E Smith Graphic Memoir Download
Last spring, I assigned a graphic memoir project in my Literature and Composition Graphic Memoir class. As part of the class, I constructed my own graphic memoir alongside my students. For this post, I want to share with you my finished project and my artist statement, a brief discussion of some of the choices I made when creating the graphic memoir. In a future post, I will go into more detail about the layout and design choices I used in the project.
From the beginning of this project, I knew that I wanted to do a graphic memoir on Lillian E. Smith. Given the time and the length of the project, I knew that I could not do a long book on her entire life, and there were certain aspects of her life and work that I had to leave out. Initially, I wanted to focus on her work with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement; however, when I started working on the graphic memoir, that focus shifted some.
I begin with Smith talking about her birth, specifically where she was born, on the border between Florida and Georgia. I use images from this region (and one from Louisiana) to highlight the landscape she describes, then I juxtapose those with images of the mountains in Northeast Georgia on the next page, the region to which her and her family moved permanently in 1915.
