G. Willow Wilson of Seattle, the current writer of the Ms. Marvel comic series, will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 29, in the Spokane Community College Lair Auditorium (Building 6) and again at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Jan. 30, at the SCC Library (Building 16).
In 2014, Wilson became the latest writer of the Ms. Marvel comic series, which was created in the late 1960s. Wilson’s version of the heroine is a Pakistani-American 16-year-old Muslim superhero named Kamala Khan from Jersey City. Wilson announced in December she will pass the torch to writer Saladin Ahmed in order to keep the comic series fresh. The last issue she will work on is scheduled for release on Feb. 13.
Wilson was born in New Jersey and attended high school in Colorado and college at Boston University. Wilson converted to Islam in 2003 and lived in Cairo, Egypt, teaching English for a number of years. She published her first graphic (pictoral) novel, Cairo, in 2007, launched her first ongoing comic series, Air, in 2008. She published a memoir, “The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American’s Journey to Love and Islam” in 2010, and her first novel, Alif the Unseen, won the 2013 World Fantasy Award.
Her visit to SCC is sponsored by the Hagan Foundation Center for the Humanities. The Center is dedicated to integrating liberal arts and humanities with the technical programs offered at SCC. It was established in 1997 by Dr. Cornelius Hagan, a retired Spokane ear, nose and throat specialist and life-long lover of books.