Sarah Leavitt is a cartoonist and educator whose particular areas of interest include autobiographical comics, formal experimentation in comics, and comics pedagogy – developing strategies for teaching comics creation as well as exploring how comics creation shapes students’ work in other forms of writing.

Sarah’s first book, Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (2010), was published in Canada and internationally, and translated into French, German and Korean. Tangles was the first comic to be nominated for a Writers’ Trust Award, and has become a widely-studied work in the growing field of comics and medicine. A feature-length animation of Tangles is in production with Giant Ant animation studio, Point Grey Pictures, Lylas Pictures and Monarch Media.

Sarah’s second book, Agnes, Murderess, was published in Canada in September 2019, and won a Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature (fiction) and an Alberta Book Publishers Award (speculative fiction). Agnes was a finalist for both Canadian comics prizes, the Doug Wright Awards and Joe Shuster Awards. Sarah has also published short comics in magazines and anthologies, as well as self-publishing her work in printed zines and online.

Something, Not Nothing, a collection of short, experimental comics about her partner’s death in 2020, will be published by Arsenal Press in fall 2024.

Sarah has been developing and teaching comics classes in the UBC School of Creative Writing since 2012. She is also an instructor in the new Biomedical Visualization and Communication Certificate, a collaboration between the UBC Faculty of Medicine Hackspace for Innovation and Visualization in Education (HIVE) and the Centre for Digital Media.

Photo credit: Jackie Dives