Why subscribe?
Goddess Memos bring you insights, new comics, and interviews with other creators, straight from the Goddess. Written, designed and produced in the hope of encouraging good work to flourish and good hearts to be nourished in both the on and off-paper worlds.
About the author/artist
Jennifer Hayden is a graphic novelist based in New Jersey. She is the author and artist of The Story of My Tits, a graphic memoir about her life and her experience with breast cancer, which was nominated for an Eisner Award and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, and French. It was named one of the best graphic novels of 2015 by The New York Times, Library Journal, GQ, Comic Book Resources, Paste, Mental Floss, Forbes, and NPR.
Hayden’s first collection Underwire was excerpted in The Best American Comics 2013. She has also self-published two collections of her online comic strips, Rushes: A Comix Diary and A Flight of Chickens. Recently she finished a graphic travel novella called Le Chat Noir about her disastrous-yet-hopeful love for France.
Hayden arrived on the comics stage at the age of forty-three, after a skirmish with breast cancer. Formerly a writer, children’s book illustrator, and acclaimed kitchen storyteller, she took to the medium instantly. She shares the heartbreak, joy, and messiness of life with the honesty, wit, and Goddess-infused wisdom of a woman in her prime.
Hayden’s work has been studied in academic texts about autobiographical comics and she contributed the only comic to the academic anthology Breast Cancer Inside Out (Peter Lang). Her comics have appeared online at Spiralbound and Cleaver Magazine and were featured in the “Women In Comics” exhibition which travelled from New York City to Rome and Naples in 2021.
A guest speaker at San Diego and New York Comic Cons, The Miami Book Fair, The Brooklyn Book Festival, and Small Press Expo, Hayden has lectured to students at The Center for Cartoon Studies, as well as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Drexel, Johns Hopkins, and NYU. She shares her work often with breast cancer groups.
Currently she is finishing her first work in color, a graphic anti-cookbook called Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner. She is hoping to use the proceeds to hire a personal chef.
