I Will Give You Rest
I Will Give You Rest
Kayla E.
Kayla E.
Narrated by Dead Head Kayla, a cartoon version of my severed head, I Will Give You Rest is both a memoir and a work of comics criticism. The book unfolds as a series of short, fragmented comics that follow Li’l Kayla and Miss Kayla as they reckon with the impact of childhood trauma, while Dead Head Kayla explores the mystical potential of the comics form. The fragmentation of the stories mirrors how I relate to spiritual texts: piece by piece, out of order. Dead Head Kayla figures decreation, embodying the contradictory act of writing and drawing my own corpse as a form of self-annihilation. The writing becomes a telling of self that lifts the self from itself. Nonlinear and experimental, the book draws on psychoanalytic theory, medieval mysticism, and mid-century children’s comics to create a meditation on faith, memory, and survival.
Literary Nonfiction, Literature
2026
About Kayla E.
Burlington, NC
Kayla E. is a Mexican American artist from Texas. She is the author of Precious Rubbish, which won the 2025 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel and received an Honorable Mention in the 2025 International Latino Book Awards. She has earned two Eisner Award nominations, and her work appears in The New Yorker , NOW ( the New Comics Anthology ), Ecotone , and The Comics Journal , among others. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, she won the Albert Alcalay Prize in Visual Arts, and in 2023–2024 she held a Hodder Fellowship in Creative Writing at Princeton University. Museums and galleries including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Culture Hole, Central Server Works / Marian Cramer Projects, Marfa Invitational, and the Goss-Michael Foundation / Hignite Projects have installed her work. She served as editor-in-chief of the Whiting Award–winning literary magazine Nat. Brut for nine years and co-edited a collection of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy comic strips. Precious Rubbish , forthcoming in Spanish and French translation, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist and appeared on the NYPL’s 2025 Best Books of the Year list. Kayla works as Creative Director at Fantagraphics and lives in North Carolina with her wife and two dogs.
Kayla E. is a Mexican American artist from Texas. She is the author of Precious Rubbish, which won the 2025 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel and received an Honorable Mention in the 2025 International Latino Book Awards. She has earned two Eisner Award nominations, and her work appears in The New Yorker , NOW ( the New Comics Anthology ), Ecotone , and The Comics Journal , among others. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, she won the Albert Alcalay Prize in Visual Arts, and in 2023–2024 she held a Hodder Fellowship in Creative Writing at Princeton University. Museums and galleries including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Culture Hole, Central Server Works / Marian Cramer Projects, Marfa Invitational, and the Goss-Michael Foundation / Hignite Projects have installed her work. She served as editor-in-chief of the Whiting Award–winning literary magazine Nat. Brut for nine years and co-edited a collection of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy comic strips. Precious Rubbish , forthcoming in Spanish and French translation, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist and appeared on the NYPL’s 2025 Best Books of the Year list. Kayla works as Creative Director at Fantagraphics and lives in North Carolina with her wife and two dogs.