Shay Mirk is a comics journalist, editor, and teacher. They are the author of Guantanamo Voices (Abrams, 2020), an illustrated oral history of Guantanamo Bay prison, which Kirkus called “extraordinary… an eye-opening, damning indictment of one of America’s worst trespasses.” Mirk is also a zine-maker and illustrator whose comics have been featured in The Nib, The New Yorker, Bitch, and NPR.
They are working on the first-ever book about the craft of creating nonfiction comics, Drawn from the Margins: The Power of Graphic Journalism. Mirk is the 2023 Applied Cartooning Fellow at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT.
At MacDowell, Mirk created a collaborative zine with MacDowell artists and staff, documenting the people, plants, and animals living on the land. They also drew several digital comics reflecting on gender and general feelings of futility.
Portrait by Jamie Thrower
