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John Jennings is a professor, author, graphic novelist, curator, Harvard Fellow, New York Times Bestseller, 2018 Eisner Winner, and all-around champion of Black culture. As Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside (UCR), Jennings examines the visual culture of race in various media forms including film, illustrated fiction, and comics and graphic novels. He is also the director of Abrams ComicArts imprint Megascope, which publishes graphic novels focused on the experiences of people of color. His research interests include the visual culture of Hip Hop, Afrofuturism and politics, Visual Literacy, Horror, and the EthnoGothic, and Speculative Design and its applications to visual rhetoric. Jennings is co-editor of the 2016 Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (Rutgers) and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center's Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem. He is co-founder and organizer of the MLK NorCal's Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco and also SOL-CON: The Brown and Black Comix Expo at the Ohio State University. Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano. Her debut short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky) was selected for the 2021 UPK New Poetry & Prose Series, and her novel manuscript-in-progress was selected by George RR Martin for the Worldbuilder Scholarship. She earned her BA at Cornell University and her MFA at UMass Amherst. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She is the Newhouse Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wellesley College and has taught at UMass Amherst, Clarion West online, and the Juniper Institute for Young Writers. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Fellowship for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Year's Best African Speculative Fiction 2021 and the NAACP award-nominated Africa Risen (Tor). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Columbia Journal, F&SF, Tor.com, Lightspeed, FANTASY Magazine, and Fiyah Literary Magazine for Black Speculative Fiction. She is currently at work on a novel. Bill Campbell is the author of Sunshine Patriots, My Booty Novel, and the anti-racism satire, Koontown Killing Kaper. Along with Edward Austin Hall, he co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond. He also co-edited Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany with Nisi Shawl, Future Fiction: New Dimensions in International Science Fiction and Fantasy with Francesco Verso, and APB: Artists against Police Brutality with Jason Rodriguez and John Jennings. His Afrofuturist spaceploitation graphic novel, Baaaad Muthaz (with David Brame and Damian Duffy) was released in 2019. His historical graphic novel with Bizhan Khodabandeh, The Day the Klan Came to Town, was released by PM Press in 2021. Campbell lives in Washington, DC, where he spends his time with his family and helms Rosarium Publishing. David Brame is proudly blackity black, an afrofuturist and scholar. His most recent scholarly creative accomplishments for 2019 and 2020 include Sanford Biggers: CODESWITCH in collaboration with Professor John Jennings, The Bronx Museum and produced by Yale University Press. His scholarly work geared towards black youth called, is called The Struggle, produced by Minnesota Press. His graphic novel After the Rain, disseminated by ABRAMS/Megascope, a short story written by Nnedi Okorafor and adapted by Professor John Jennings, was nominated for an Eisner. His comic work explores issues of race and identity in the context of the American South, Black Gothica, mysticism and the African diaspora. Damian Duffy is a cartoonist, scholar, writer, curator, lecturer, teacher, and a Glyph Comics, Eisner Comics, Bram Stoker, and Hugo Award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novelist. He holds a MS and PhD in Library and Information Sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches courses on computers & culture, and social media & global change. His many publications range from academic essays (in comics form) on new media & learning, to art books about underrepresentation in comics culture, to editorial comics, to a graphic novel adaptation of Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, with his J2D2 Arts counterpart John Jennings. Kindred: A graphic novel adaptation (Abrams ComicArts) was awarded the 2017 Brame Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Graphic Novel, and the 2018 Eisner Comics Award for Best Adaptation From Another Medium. Their follow-up, Parable of the Sower: A graphic novel adaptation (Abrams ComicArts) won the 2021 Ignyte Award for Best Comics Team, and the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic. The co-editor of the Black Comix Returns art book from the Magnetic Collection at Lion Forge Comics, Damian has given talks and lead workshops about comics, art, and education internationally.
