Phoebe Gloeckner

Phoebe Gloeckner is a graphic novelist. Her book, The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2002), was praised as "one of the most brutally honest, shocking, tender, beautiful portrayals of growing up female in America." Cartoonist R. Crumb called her story, Minnie’s Third Love (published in A Child’s Life and Other Stories) one of the “comicbook masterpieces of all time.”

Her books have been published in multiple languages and her artwork has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe.

In 2008, Gloeckner was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship to continue work on an on-going project centering on the life of the family of a murdered teenager living in Ciudad Juárez, several hundred feet from the US-Mexico border. Throughout and preceeding the escalation and gradual recession of the current period of intense violence in the city (3,200+ homicides in 2010), Gloeckner has been observing the evolution of the family, the case of their daughter’s murder, and the neighborhood they live in. The end product of this process will be several novels.

Gloeckner has long experimented with the form of the novel- Diary is a hybrid of prose and graphic novel, and her current projects will incorporate various media (audio, motion, and static) with text. The challenge is to create an electronic “multi-touch” book offering a “seamless” reading experience, a work that feels to be of one piece (the whole, greater than the sum of its parts) rather than an “enhanced” novel with multi-media annotations and side matter. She is working concurrently on printed versions of these books.

Visit PLAY to see a video interview with Phoebe Gloeckner from The Why Series: Why We Make Creative Work.