Wild Talks Lecture Series: Martha Wainwright

Martha Wainwright is an internationally renowned singer-songwriter with over two decades of industry experience. Critically acclaimed for the rawness and emotional honesty of both her vocals and lyrics, her albums include: Martha Wainwright (2005); I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too (2008); Come Home to Mama (2012); the JUNO nominated Songs in the Dark (2015), a collaboration with her half-sister Lucy Wainwright Roche; Goodnight City (2016); and her latest album Love Will Be Reborn (2021). She is also an actress and was featured in Martin Scorsese’s Aviator and the HBO special, Olive Kitteridge. 

Born into music royalty — the daughter of folk legends Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III and sister to the highly acclaimed, genre-defying singer Rufus Wainwright — Martha grew up in a world filled with incomparable musical legends: Anna McGarrigle, Leonard Cohen, Suzzy Roche, Richard and Linda Thompson and Emmylou Harris. She struggled to find her voice in a milieu in which every drama was refracted through song. Then, in 2005, she released her critically acclaimed debut album, Martha Wainwright, containing the blistering hit, “Bloody Mother F*cking Asshole,” which the Sunday Times called one of the best songs of the year. That release and the albums that followed showcased Martha’s searing songwriting and established her as a powerful voice to be reckoned with. 

Cecil Castellucci (she/her/they) is the award-winning New York Times bestselling and Eisner-nominated author of books and graphic novels, including Shade, The Changing Girl, Boy Proof, The Plain Janes, The Year of the Beasts, Female Furies, Batgirl, Star Wars: Hyperspace and Odd Duck. Her latest graphic novel, the cli-fi hopepunk book Shifting Earth, is out from Dark Horse Comics. Her short stories have been published in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, and other literary and comics anthologies.

In a former life, they were known as Cecil Seaskull in the Canadian ‘90s indie bands, Bite and Nerdy Girl. She has written three opera librettos incorporating comics: Les Aventures de Madame Merveille (w/ Andre Ristic / 2010), Hockey Noir: The Opera (w/ Andre Ristic / 2018), and Metternich! (w/ Charlotte Marlowe /2021). They have also begun initiating a song cycle, Space/Craft, inspired by exploratory spacecraft. The first of the song series premiered in 2023 and was inspired by the Parker Solar Probe (w/Rose Miranda Hall). Currently, they are adapting their graphic novel Soupy Leaves Home into a play, finishing up a new YA graphic novel and researching an unknown World War 1 soldier for a hybrid comics/prose novel. They are a NASA Solar System Ambassador and recently received a Fulbright Specialist Award to Denmark, where they are also guest faculty at the Graphic Storytelling Program at VIA University. They live in Montreal.