Because of my own medical vulnerabilities as well as those of my loved ones, I was not able to take to the streets, and so I turned to my sketchbook.

It was still early in the COVID-19 pandemic, and it would be nearly a year before the first vaccines would become available. The project began simply enough, as a collection of drawings I posted to my Instagram account in response to the 2020 summer of protest in support of Black Lives. My most recent book, Living While Black: Portraits of Everyday Resistance (Chronicle Books, November 2022), was created out of this awareness.

These seemingly contradictory pursuits mean I have experienced firsthand the ways an understanding of the Black past can help not only to make sense of our present, but also to conjure the hope and insight necessary for imagining boldly empowered and inclusive Black futures. I am also a professor of English whose scholarship is focused on the history of 19th-century African American literature and literary communities. I am an African American artist, illustrator, and comic creator whose work explores the complexities of race, gender, and power today and imagines the possible shape and texture of Black life and community in the future. It is a theme that has also informed much of my own work. Within the first pages of the book, readers are introduced to one of its primary messages, that the protagonist’s success at navigating the future relies heavily on her knowledge of and reverence for the past. In Binti, the Hugo Award-winning novella by African futurist writer Nnedi Okorafor, the title character summons the courage to imagine a new future for herself by drawing on the deep intellectual traditions of her people, the Himba of Kunene in South West Africa.

Nnedi okorafor's binti