MoCCA 2026 Application
Yao Xiao is a writer and artist based in New York City. She is a MacDowell Fellow, and the author of graphic novel Everything Is Beautiful, And I’m Not Afraid, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Catapult, Lit Hub, and Autostraddle. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College and teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
The though-line of Yao Xiao’s introspective comics is about bridging worlds that are more connected than we think —art, immigration, language, queerness. They are all suitable for kids, young adults, and adults. In this year’s application, there are new memoir comics about coming-of-age as an outsider, manga that explores home and soul, and a collection about the importance of play.
Substack:
Books and Zines to be Exhibited At MoCCA Fest 2026:
New Work
Have A Good Life
27-page graphic memoir about taking a cross-country bus trip to get closer to the feeling of being an outsider.
If you are not afraid of going the wrong way, you’ll go more places. This feeling motivated me for many years throughout my life, when I was an international student from China, nearly two decades ago. When I first moved to New York, I was 20 years old, and knew no one. Instead of suppressing the sense of isolation, I decided to lean into it and do things that got me closer to the sense of loneliness. Taking a bus during Christmas across the country, seeing snow-covered landscapes, being the only Asian person on the bus in most rural towns, having a fantasy of going home and losing it, I found resilience in making the effort to find home one day.
This is a self-published comic, a self-contained story in connection to a book-length memoir I am developing about my experience moving from China to the United States as an unaccompanied teenager.
Sample pages (click to enlarge)
Can I Have My Inner Kid Back?
Learning to Play In A Time of Crisis
In China, my 96-year-old grandma fell down a ladder trying to change a light bulb. On my father’s side, grandpa is moved back to his home village to live out his remaining days. In New York, the connection I have with my parents, built on carefully scheduled international phone calls, starts to unravel as caretaking and work take over our lives.
I’m worrying about things I can’t see. Anxious about a future that doesn’t exist yet. Meanwhile, being an artist is invisible to my family, and I am not sure if I should keep making the effort to be seen. There used to be an “inner kid” in me to keep things exciting and positive, and I haven’t seen her for a while. Is this just getting old?
To get the “inner kid” back, I go out of my way to see, hear, and draw new things: birdwatching, murder mysteries, selling things at a flea market, reading a newspaper. I talk to artists about how they face the world. I learn about authoritarianism, immigration, preservation, through cyanotypes, performance art, artist talks. This collection of comics explore the need for taking your mind off a constant sense of crisis, the inevitability of getting pulled back, and accepting everything that is a part of being alive.
This is a self-published comic, 30-pages long, and it will be debuting at MoCCA.
Sample pages (click to enlarge)
Daruma Adventure
This experimental manga volume explores the adventure of a monkey named San-san who wishes to see her grandparents again. Through the help of a friend, San-san boards a midnight train headed for a shrine known for dealing with the soul.
This manga originally developed in Japan in the manga intensive, which I was a co-faculty of, at International Manga Museum and Kyoto Seika University.
Sample pages (click to enlarge)
Alien Sketchbook
A memoir comic about language, immigration, and art. A teenager who doesn’t speak English well makes friends and expresses herself through sketchbook drawings.
Returning Books and Zines
Everything Is Beautiful, And I’m Not Afraid (Andrews McMeel, 2020)
This one-of-a-kind graphic novel explores the poetics of searching for connection, belonging, and identity through the fictional life of a young, queer immigrant. Inspired by the creator's own experiences as a queer, China-born illustrator living in the United States, Everything Is Beautiful, and I'm Not Afraid has an undeniable memoir quality to its recollection and thought-provoking accounts of what it's like to navigate the complexities of seeking belonging—mentally and geographically.
No Word Island (2024)
<What can’t you express in English?> No Word Island is a comic that challenges the convention of how non-English words are depicted in immigrant comics, and explores the limit of language and the power of visual imagination.
Self-published. Printed locally in New York Chinatown
Prints
A selection of prints will be for sale.
