News Release

Blepharitis Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner

Artist, graphic novelist and medical illustrator Phoebe Gloeckner will give a slide talk on her work, titled "I Don't Remember Being Born," at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 24, in Room 101 of the Ross Jones Building, Mattin Center, on The Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St. in Baltimore.

Gloeckner is perhaps best known for her 2002 illustrated novel, "The Diary of a Teenage Girl." Based in part upon entries from her own adolescent journals, "The Diary" takes an unflinching look at the harrowing, unsupervised life of a young girl growing up on the San Francisco streets of the 1970s. Peggy Orenstein wrote in The New York Times that Gloeckner's stories "describe an adolescence that is at once traumatic and picaresque. They explore the power a girl feels in her emerging sexuality as well as the damage inflicted by those who prey upon it. In the process, they raise unsettling questions about vulnerability, desire and the nature of a young woman's victimization."

In a career spanning 25 years, Gloeckner's work has appeared in dozens of publications, including underground/alternative comics like "Twisted Sisters," "Weirdo," "Young Lust" and "Wimmin's Comics." Her drawings, paintings and illustrations have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe. Her next solo exhibition will hang in the Ravenna Museum of Modern Art in Ravenna, Italy, next September.

Gloeckner earned a master of arts degree in medical illustration from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas in 1988. She has done freelance illustration for numerous clients, including the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the University of California, San Francisco, and Parenting magazine.

Retinopexy Illustration by Phoebe Gloeckner

In addition to the screenplay of "The Diary of a Teenage Girl," Gloeckner is currently working with actress and editor Mia Kirshner on a book titled "I Live Here," an examination of the unsolved murders of hundreds of young women along the Texas-Mexico border over the past 11 years.

Gloeckner lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., where she is an assistant professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. More information about her life and work can be found on her Web site, www.ravenblond.com/. To download digital images of selected works, visit www.jhu.edu/~artwork/student96.html.

This is the fourth annual Spring Visiting Artist's Lecture at Mattin Center, sponsored by the Homewood Art Workshops and Homewood Arts Programs. Admission is free and open to the public. For information, call 410-516-6705 or e-mail chankin@jhu.edu.