Bread and Wine

Bread & Wine is Samuel R. Delany's autobiographical graphic novel about how he met a homeless man, Dennis, who became his partner.

Written by black, gay science-fiction writer, professor, and theorist Samuel R. Delany, and drawn by multi-media artist and cartoonist Mia Wolff, Bread & Wine is a graphic autobiography that flashes back to the unlikely story of how Delany befriended Dennis, and how they became an enduring couple―Delany, a professor at Philadelphia’s Temple University, Dennis, an intelligent man living on the streets. For casual readers and fans, Bread & Wine is a moving, sexually charged love story, with visuals informed by Wolff’s sensitive portrayal of the couple’s physicality. Her black-and-white, pen-and-ink work not only expressionistically represents the characters’ “body language” and the bustling New York setting but is also filled with impish art references and visual puns. The scholarly potential for the book, based on the poem “Bread and Wine” by the German lyric poet Friedrich Holderlin, not only encompasses queer, African American, and graphic novel studies, but also exploration in the literary and paraliterary academic fields.

This updated edition includes a new foreword by the novelist Junot Diaz, the earlier edition’s introduction by Alan Moore, commentary by the book’s protagonists, Delany and Dennis, and a new interview with Delany and Wolff.

Black and white illustrations throughout

Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., also known as “Chip,” is an American writer and Science Fiction Hall of Fame inductee (in 2002), and a recipient of four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career. He retired in 2015 as professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, and is Professor Emeritus at that University.

Alan Moore is a magician and performer, and is widely regarded as the best and most influential writer in the history of comics. His seminal works include From Hell, V for Vendetta, and Watchmen, for which he won the Hugo Award. He was born in 1953 in Northampton, UK, and has lived there ever since.

Junot Díaz is a Dominican American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a former fiction editor at Boston Review. He has won numerous literary honors such as the PEN/Malamud Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao).

Mia Wolff grew up drawing, reading, and climbing trees before arriving at Pratt Institute to study painting.  From there she joined the Big Apple Circus, subsequently going on the road with a three ring show as the catcher in a double trapeze act.  Returning to NYC, she went back to painting (wolffland.com) and making books (Catcher, Bread & Wine, Eye Feed). Her latest, The Empty Lot (2024), is a long monograph/graphic novel that is akin to an operatic roller coaster in paint and ink. She currently lives in Brooklyn.