For Immediate Release
Contact: Eden Miller
Bethesda, Maryland – June 26, 2018

Small Press Expo Announces Our Second Group of Special Guests: Jules Feiffer, Aminder Dhaliwal, Ngozi Ukazu, Molly Ostertag, Matthew Thurber, David Small and Dash Shaw for SPX 2018!

Small Press Expo proudly announces more Special Guests for SPX 2018. The festival takes place on Saturday and Sunday, September 15-16, at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center and will have over 650 creators, 280 exhibitor tables and 22 programming slots to introduce attendees to the amazing world of independent and small press comics. Additional Special Guests will be announced shortly.
SPX 2018 is honored to have the following creators as Special Guests to this year’s show:

Jules Feiffer
In a rare appearance, Small Press Expo is proud to host Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize and Oscar winning cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, children’s book author and illustrator. The author of over 35 books, Feiffer comes to SPX with his newest release, The Ghost Script, the finale of the critically lauded Kill Your Mother trilogy, a tale of the Red Scare and Hollywood witch hunts.
Photo copyright Zelie Rellim

Aminder Dhaliwal
Aminder Dhaliwal is a native of Brampton, Ontario, who received a Bachelors of Animation from Sheridan College. She now lives in Los Angeles, where she is the Director at Disney TV Animation. Previously, she worked as a Storyboard Director at Cartoon Network and Storyboard Director on the Nickelodeon show Sanjay and Craig. She has serialized Woman World biweekly on instagram since March 2017 and has garnered 150,000 followers. Woman World was nominated for an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Online Comic.

Ngozi Ukazu
Ngozi Ukazu graduated from Yale University in 2013 with a degree in computing and the arts and went on to receive a master’s in sequential art and comics. During her senior year at Yale, she first became interested in ice hockey while researching and writing a screenplay about the sport. She used her newfound knowledge of hockey to launch Check, Please! in 2013, and it later went on to be the most funded webcomics Kickstarter of all time. checkpleasecomic.com.

Molly Ostertag
Molly Ostertag is the author and artist of The Witch Boy and its upcoming sequel, The Hidden Witch, as well as the artist behind the long running webcomic Strong Female Protagonist and the graphic novels Shattered Warrior and The Witch Boy. She lives in Los Angeles with her girlfriend and various cats, where she also works in animation as a writer and designer. Her comics use fantasy to explore themes of social justice, identity, and empathy.

Matthew Thurber
Matthew Thurber is an artist and musician living in Brooklyn. He is the author of the graphic novels Art Comic (2018), 1-800-MICE (2011), and Infomaniacs (2013). Thurber was the recipient of a NYFA fellowship in fiction in 2010 for 1-800-MICE. He has performed its Anti-Matter Cabaret since 2003 at venues such as Issue Project Room, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Fumetto Festival in Switzerland. His full-length play Mining the Moon was produced at the Brick Theater in July 2014. His artwork has been shown in galleries such as Southfirst and Knowmoregames in New York and Weird Things in Toronto.

David Small
David Small, author of the #1 New York Times best-selling Stitches, is the recipient of the Caldecott Medal, the Christopher Medal, and the E. B. White Award. He and his wife, the writer Sarah Stewart, live in Michigan. SPX proudly welcomes him with his new book, Home After Dark, a dark tale of adolescence set in the 1950’s California.
Photo copyright Gordon Trice

Dash Shaw
Dash Shaw is the creator of many graphic novels, such as Doctors, Bottomless Belly Button and New School, all from Fantagraphics. He wrote and directed the animated feature “My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea” which premiered in the 2016 New York Film Festival main slate and at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Small Press Expo (SPX) is the preeminent showcase for the exhibition of independent comics, graphic novels, and alternative political cartoons. SPX is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit that brings together more than 650 artists and publishers to meet their readers, booksellers, and distributors each year. Graphic novels, mini comics, and alternative comics will all be on display and for sale by their authors and illustrators. The expo includes a series of panel discussions and interviews with this year’s guests.
The Ignatz Award is a festival prize held every year at SPX recognizing outstanding achievement in comics and cartooning, with the winners chosen by attendees at the show.
As in previous years, profits from the SPX will go to support the SPX Graphic Novel Gift Program, which funds graphic novel purchases for public and academic libraries, as well as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), which protects the First Amendment rights of comic book readers and professionals. For more information on the CBLDF, visit their website at http://www.cbldf.org. For more information on the Small Press Expo, please visit http://www.smallpressexpo.com.

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