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Donahue

Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year

Arwen Donahue
Appearance Date: 10/29/2022

In 130 ink-and-watercolor drawings, the story of one year on a family farm in Kentucky unfolds in captured moments of daily life: Donahue’s husband chopping wood, a cow sniffing her head, her daughter tending to goats after a hard day at school. Each visual is paired with a written reflection on the day’s doings, interwoven with the longer-arc history of her family, the farm, and their community. In telling the story of a farm family’s struggle to survive and thrive, Landings grapples with the legacy of our cultural divide between art and land and celebrates the beauty discovered along the way.

Meet the Author

Arwen Donahue
Arwen Donahue

Arwen Donahue is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, and oral historian. She is the author and illustrator of the graphic memoir Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year (Hub City Press), which includes an introduction by New York Times bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver. She is also the author of This Is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak (University Press of Kentucky). Donahue’s comics and graphic stories have appeared in The Nib, The Rumpus, The Indiana Review, and the forthcoming Field Guide to Graphic Literature (Rose Metal Press). Homebodies, Donahue’s series of short graphic memoirs about farm life, was The Rumpus editor’s choice for best comics of 2017.
Donahue has received grants and awards from The Sustainable Arts Foundation, The Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Xeric Foundation, The Kentucky Humanities Council, and the Kentucky Oral History Commission, and an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She lives on a farm in Nicholas County, Kentucky, where her family has raised produce for local markets for over 20 years.