Jennifer Hayden

Jennifer Hayden is a comix maker and graphic novelist based in New Jersey. She is the creator of The Story of My Tits, a graphic memoir about her life and her experience with breast cancer which was nominated for an Eisner Award and named one of the best graphic novels of 2015 by GQ, Library Journal, Paste, and NPR. Translated into Italian and Spanish, the book came out last fall in French from Presses de la Cité as Nénés Chéris, called “immanquable” (unmissable) by Radio France and shortlisted for Elle France Magazine’s 2022 comics grand prix.

Hayden arrived on the comics stage at the age of forty-three, after a skirmish with breast cancer. Formerly a writer, children’s book illustrator, and acclaimed kitchen storyteller, she took to the medium instantly. She shares the heartbreak, joy, and messiness of life with the honesty, wit, and Goddess-infused wisdom of a woman in her prime.

Hayden’s first collection Underwire (Top Shelf, 2011) was excerpted in The Best American Comics 2013. She has self-published two collections of her web comix—Rushes: A Comix Diary and Scrapbook (published as A Flight of Chickens.) Online, her work has appeared at Spiralbound, Cleaver Magazine, and The Comics Journal. Academic texts about autobiographical comics have included her work, and she contributed the only comic to the academic anthology Breast Cancer Inside Out (Peter Lang). Art exhibits have featured her comix from Rome to Naples and Madrid.

An impassioned speaker whose favorite flavor is irreverence, Hayden has been a guest of San Diego and New York Comic Cons, The Miami Book Fair, The Brooklyn Book Festival, and Small Press Expo. She has lectured to students at The Center for Cartoon Studies, as well as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Drexel, Johns Hopkins, and NYU. 

Currently Hayden is finishing her first work in color, a graphic anti-cookbook called Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner. She plans to use the proceeds to hire a personal chef.