2016 Excellence-in-Features Award — Jonathan Guyer The Society for Features Journalism has recognized ICWA Fellow Jonathan Guyer as the third-place winner for General Feature in its 2016 Excellence-in-Features Awards contest. Guyer’s winning article, The Offending Art: Political Cartooning after the Charlie Hebdo Attacks, was published by Harvard’s Neiman Reports. In the piece, he explores the complexities of political cartooning after the Charlie Hebdo attacks...
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Modern Painters / BlouinArtInfo.com June/July 2016 – In a report for the global art magazine Modern Painters, Fellow Jonathan Guyer writes about why art’s biggest stars are flocking to the collecting mecca of Qatar. Guyer attended the New York Times‘ Art for Tomorrow conference in the conservative, constitutional monarchy’s capital. He interviewed Jeff Koons and Marina...
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18 April 2016 Dear Edward, In January, I had the distinct honor of meeting Adonis, the Syrian poet who is perhaps the preeminent public intellectual in the Arab world. He is an innovator of the prose poem in Arabic, a literary scholar and translator, an ardent secularist, and a lightning rod. Some background: Born Ali...
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In a new article on NYR Daily, ICWA Fellow Jonathan Guyer interviews Syrian poet Adonis, inventor of the Arabic prose poem and important literary figure. At 86, the Syrian luminary is a shrewd commentator on current affairs and an audacious anti-religious crusader who has come under criticism for his views on the Syrian civil war. This...
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7 March 2016 One Sunday in January, Islam Gawish was running late. The 26-year-old cartoonist, famous for sardonic stick figures published on his viral Facebook page “El-Warka” or “The Paper,” was due at the Cairo International Book Fair for a friend’s book launch. But at midday, a group of police investigators burst into the Egypt...
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Harper’s Magazine – In a feature released this month, Fellow Jonathan Guyer writes about the role of underground comics in Egypt. The piece focuses on cartoonist and satirist Mohamed Andeel, one of four founders of Tok Tok, the zine that launched a politicized comics movement in the country. The feature is available online to Harper’s subscribers or...
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21 January, 2016 Ahmed Naji is a 30-year-old journalist and novelist. When we meet for dinner in mid-December, he faces a lawsuit for “infringing on public decency” that might land him in prison for two years. State prosecutors are throwing the book at him for a sexually charged chapter of his Cairo novel Using Life, which was republished...
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The Cairo Review of Global Affairs – In his review of Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir, The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984, Fellow Jonathan Guyer delves into the growing legitimacy of comics as art and “the power of alternative modes of history.” The Arab of the Future is the first in what will...
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13 January 2015 I had flown to Beirut for the first annual Symposium on Arabic Comics to deliver a paper about the Franco-Syrian comic artist Riad Sattouf’s incredibly popular graphic novel, The Arab of the Future. As part of the American University of Beirut’s symposium, and kicking off the events, a top Lebanese wedding planner...
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12 Nov 2015 Le Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Alger is held on hallowed ground. Between the massive Martyrs Monument and the Army Museum, the white tent city of booksellers, exhibitions, plenaries and workshops sits above the hills, upon a multi-floor shopping center of the Esplanade de Riadh El Feth. The Martyrs Monument’s distinctive...
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