Let’s remember G Willow Wilson, beloved author and Northwest treasure, born on this day in 1982 (August 31)
G. Willow Wilson has long been one of my favorite authors to call the Seattle area home. The authors who work in literary fiction and comics (its own form of literature) are far and few between, and she’s among the best.
Here’s how Wikipedia describes her career (in part):
Wilson’s writing career began from her work as a freelance music critic for DigBoston.[6] After moving to Cairo, she contributed articles to the Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine and the National Post.[7] She was also a regular contributor to the now-defunct Egyptian opposition weekly Cairo Magazine. Wilson was the first Western journalist to be granted a private interview with Ali Gomaa after his promotion to the position of Grand Mufti of Egypt.[8] Additionally, Wilson released a memoir titled The Butterfly Mosque about life in Egypt during the Mubarak regime, which was named a Seattle Times Best Book of 2010.[6]
Her first graphic novel, Cairo, with art by M.K. Perker, was published by Vertigo in 2007,[7] and named one of the best graphic novels of 2007 by Publishers Weekly, The Edmonton Journal/CanWest News, and Comics Worth Reading.[9] The paperback edition of Cairo was named one of Best Graphic Novels for High School Students in 2008 by School Library Journal, and one of 2009’s Top Ten Graphic Novels for Teens by the American Library Association.[10]
Her first ongoing comic series, Air, launched by Vertigo in 2008[11][12] reunited her with Perker, and was nominated for an Eisner Award for ‘Best New Series’ of 2009.[13] NPR named Air one of the top comics of 2009,[14] and it also received acclaim from the Fairfield Weekly, Comic Book Resources,[15] Marie Claire,[16] and Library Journal.[17] Other works for DC include fill-in issues #704 and 706 of Superman, the five-issue mini-series Vixen: Return of the Lion, starring the Justice League member Vixen with art by CAFU,[18][19][20] and The Outsiders.
Wilson then wrote Mystic (2011), a four-issue miniseries for Marvel Comics with art by David Lopez. Although a CrossGen revival, Willow’s Mystic bears little resemblance to its previous incarnation.
Her debut novel Alif the Unseen (Grove/Atlantic) won the 2013 World Fantasy Award for best novel.[21][22][23]
In 2014, Marvel debuted a new Ms. Marvel series written by Wilson. The book stars Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenager living in Jersey City, New Jersey, who takes up the mantle after the previous Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers, took up the name Captain Marvel.
Alif the Unseen is such a great novel, and this is how the Washington Post reviewed it, upon its release in 2012:
Wilson has said that her novel grew out of a “wonderfully clarifying kind of rage,” fed by her frustration with the failure of many Americans, including some in the publishing industry, to grasp the significance of social media as a medium for social change, especially in the Middle East. Yet she is far too canny a writer to let earnest or angry didactics hijack her tale. Instead, she seduces readers with a narrative that integrates the all-too-familiar terrors of contemporary political repression with supernatural figures from “The Thousand and One Nights”: jinn, marids, sila, demons.
…and writing about Wilson in the New Yorker, Jia Tolentino said:
Wilson, who is thirty-four, has taken an unlikely path to the center of this debate. She was born in New Jersey, in Monmouth County; in her 2010 memoir, “The Butterfly Mosque,” she describes spending her adolescence as “an upper-middle-class American white girl with bland politics and polite beliefs.” She converted to Islam when she was twenty. Now she is often asked to do things that many minorities in white-dominated fields might find familiar: to speak on behalf of minority artists generally and to defend her work’s existence. I met her a week after the Gabriel kerfuffle, at a coffee shop in Brooklyn. She wore a deep-green hijab, a camel blazer, and whimsical jewelry — a bow-shaped bracelet, a tiny star-shaped stud in her nose. She speaks gently, alternating “shucks” and “gosh” with the occasional four-letter word. “Some people were really hoping that ‘Ms. Marvel’ had been run into the ground, and I’d live out the rest of my life as a brand killer,” she told me cheerfully. “The Katharine Hepburn of comics — nobody will see her stuff!” she added, alluding to Hepburn’s onetime label as “box-office poison.”
For more reading, see:
