Small Press Expo has announced the first Special Guests for SPX 2022. The first in-person show in three years takes place on Saturday September 17 and Sunday September 18 with programming and workshops about the amazing world of independent comics and an exhibitor floor with over 500 creators.

Additional Special Guests will be announced over the next few weeks.

Keith Knight is the inspiration and Executive Producer of the Hulu series Woke, as well as being a current nominee for the  Cartoonist of the Year Reuben Award. Among Keith’s many other awards are the Glyph Award, the Harvey Kurtzman Award for Best Syndicated Comic Strip, the Inkpot Award from San Diego ComiCon along with receiving a NAACP History Maker Award. His latest cartoon collection, Good On Both Sides, the fifth collection of his socio-political single-panel cartoon, (th)ink.

“Radical: My Year with a Socialist Senator is a remarkable first-hand account of New Yorker cartoonist, Sofia Warren’s experience embedded with New York State Senator Julia Salazar and her staff during their first year in office. “So much of this experience was a surprise to me,” says Warren: “that for their entire first legislative session, Julia and her staff let me be in the room.” Sofia will be making her first appearance at SPX.

Ruben Bolling is the author of the weekly satirical comic strip “Tom the Dancing Bug,” which has appeared in hundreds of publications, including The Washington Post, The Village Voice, and The New York Times and currently appears on the online publications BoingBoing.net, DailyKos.com, and GoComics.com.  Ruben has won the Herblock Prize, an RFK Journalism Award, a National Cartoonists Society Award, a Society of Illustrators Gold Medal, and a Berryman Award from the National Press Foundation and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize Finalist (2019 and 2021).

Lonnie Millsap has been twice nominated for the prestigious Rueben Award and has won the Los Angeles National Cartoonists Society Dingy Award along with the Comic Art Professional Society’s Don Rico award. In 2018, his first cartoon was accepted by The New Yorker, which used his cartoons for their renowned Caption Contest. Millsap was also the character designer for Donny Hathaway’s Official animated ‘This Christmas’ music video released by Warner Records that has well over two million views. His work has also appeared in season one and two of Keith Knight’s television show, ‘Woke.’ Millsap’s latest cartoon book release is titled ‘Hit It To The Mermaid!’ (2022).

Megan Kelso has been drawing comics for over 30 years. In 2007, she was invited by The New York Times to serialize her “Watergate Sue” comic as part of the weekly “Funny Pages” feature. In 2019, she was selected for a public art commission for Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle.  Her books include The Squirrel Mother (2006), Artichoke Tales (2010), and Queen of the Black Black (2011).

Tommi Parrish is a cartoonist and painter based in Montreal, QC. Their debut work, The Lie and How We Told It, won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for the best LGBTQ graphic novel, was nominated for the Ignatz award, and was featured in several best of 2018 lists and translated into several languages.