Ebony Flowers

Ebony Flowers is an ethnographer, author, and awarding-winning cartoonist. Her most recent book, Hot Comb (Drawn and Quarterly, 2019), is a collection of stories about Black women’s hair.  

As a Radcliffe fellow, Flowers will work on her upcoming book, “Awake Overnight,” a multimodal graphic novel to be read through sight and touch. A collection of six fictional stories, “Awake Overnight” centers the lives of direct care staff—most of whom are Black women and immigrants of color—working in assisted living facilities for people experiencing physical, developmental, or mental-health disability. Flowers will spend most of her time developing the tactile components for the book.  

Flowers received a 2017 Rona Jaffe Award, a 2019 Believer Book Award for Fiction, and a 2020 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Short Story and was also nominated for a 2020 NAACP Image Award (in the Outstanding Literary Work–Youth/Teens category). She holds a PhD in curriculum and instruction from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.