Artist's Statement: Kenya tells a personal story, through a simple comic-strip format, of a teen undergoing difficult changes. I was inspired to create the lead character by listening to detained young women and reading The Beat Within: A Weekly Publication of Writing and Art from the Inside. During the roundtable discussion with the detained youth at the old Juvenile Hall, many of the young women expressed their love of predatory cats like tigers and panthers. Their stories and opinions about their lives reminded me of my own painful adolescence. I took my pain, fused it with theirs, and decided to create a hopeful comic strip of a tiger girl named Kenya who overcomes her insecurity about becoming a woman.