Ebony Flowers

Ebony Victoria Flowers is an American cartoonist, prose writer, and ethnographer based in Denver, Colorado. Born and raised in Maryland, she holds a BA in Biological Anthropology from the University of Maryland College Park and a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she completed her dissertation partially as a comic. Her scholarly background and her love of drawing converged when she enrolled in a comics class taught by Lynda Barry in 2012 — her first comic, drawn only eight years before the publication of her debut book. Her debut graphic novel Hot Comb (Drawn & Quarterly, 2019) is a collection of fiction and creative nonfiction short stories exploring the central role of hair in the lives of Black women and girls coming of age. It was praised in Publishers Weekly ('poignant and insightful'), the Montreal Gazette, the Toronto Star, The Quietus, and the Brooklyn Rail, and named by multiple critics as a breakout debut. She is also the creator of My Lil Sister Lena — a short comic about the only Black girl on an all-white softball team — and Emotional Register, a comic about pandemic parenting. She contributed to the anthology Drawing Power: Women's Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival (edited by Diane Noomin, introduction by Roxane Gay). Her work has been published in The Paris Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. A recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award in 2017, she began drawing her first comic while completing her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a class taught by Lynda Barry.