By Name and Story: Liam Cassidy

“My name is Liam Cassidy. I study illustration and visual culture here at WashU, and I’m from St. Louis.

I knew I wanted to be a writer and artist from a young age. I think a lot of my early stuff is pretty much Uniball black pen on copy paper. Over the course of the last two years, I’ve sharpened my skills. Shreyas Krishnan has taught me to be more controlled about my work and be thinking things through before I started putting pen to paper. The comic form is so natural to me that I kind of go right into it, but she’s helped me slow down and kind of see this whole arc of the story.

Right now, I’m working on short stories in comic form. So I have some fiction short stories and a memoir that I’m working on that’s going to be a serialized project.

I chose WashU because this program in particular was something I was looking for — before I really knew what I was looking for. Mixing word and image together was what I wanted to do. It’s an inspiring place to see, all the work that people are doing. It makes you want to make better work.

The Sam Fox School is very collaborative. It’s a very open program that allows you to figure out how you fit into this world. I’m going to be in a better position to publish a longer form book, and now I have a handle on how that happens.”