Violet Kitchen

Violet Kitchen (they/them) is a genderqueer cripple, award-winning cartoonist, illustrator, and recovering hermit who makes their home on the banks of the Connecticut River in Vermont. A 2023 graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies, they now work as a comics librarian at CCS while pursuing a prolific career in the small press comics scene. In 2025, Kitchen’s minicomic Allodynia won the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Minicomic, cementing their place among the most exciting emerging voices in indie comics. They were also awarded a 2023 MICE Mini-Grant for their minicomic How To Fall In Love.

Beyond their personal practice, Kitchen is the co-founder of Go Press Girl!, a comics micropress centered around the experimental, the eccentric, and artmaking as a gift-giving practice, alongside their friend Rachel Bivens. They also serve as lead editor of The Ladybroad Ledger, a broadsheet anthology featuring women and non-binary cartoonists from Vermont, which they revived with fellow CCS classmates after a pandemic-induced hiatus. Their work has appeared in anthologies including Riff Raff #1 (The Gutter, 2024) and Failure to Launch (Iron Circus Comics, 2024).

Kitchen’s comics explore themes of isolation and interiority, chance connections, the poetry of the mundane, and the ecstasies and horrors of being embodied. An avid history buff with a particular focus on radicalism, futurism, and ill-fated expeditions to the Antarctic, they bring a unique perspective to their work. Their work has been described as fundamentally about the limits of empathy—one reviewer called Allodynia their “strongest work to date.” They make comics about what it means to not fit in socially, while knowing there are places you can fit in, even if they’re not safe. They are also a member of the Cartoonist Cooperative, a collective of independent cartoonists.

In addition to their comics practice, Kitchen has worked as an associate editor at the eccentric small press Beehive Books and contributed illustrations to Solomon Goldstein-Rose’s The 100% Solution: A Plan for Solving Climate Change (Melville House, 2020).

Explore Violet Kitchen’s comics: Allodynia, Crawlspace.