This year Jerry Craft’s “New Kid” made publishing history when it became the first graphic novel to win the John Newbery Medal. His best-selling book also won the Coretta Scott King Book Award. The story of a Black 12-year-old adjusting to life at a new private school with mostly white students echoes Craft’s own childhood in New York City in the 1970s. The author and illustrator is also the creator of the Mama’s Boyz comic strip.
BOOKS: What are you reading?
CRAFT: I am heavily under deadline for “New Kid 2,” so I’m doing all my reading through audio books while I work. I just yesterday finished Trevor Noah’s “Born a Crime.” Wow, what a life he’s led.
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BOOKS: What have been some of your other favorites on audio recently?
CRAFT: “Opposite of Always” by Justin Reynolds and “Hey, Kiddo“ by Jarrett J. Krosoczka. I’m about to start “Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky” by Kwame Mbalia, which is mythological but with kids of color.
BOOKS: What’s the last book you read as opposed to listened to?
CRAFT: “Dragon Hoops,” Gene Luen Yang’s new graphic novel. I read a lot of graphic novels. I’m also a huge Elizabeth Acevedo fan. Two of my favorite books I read last year are “With the Fire on High” and “The Poet X.” She’s a poet but those two books are novels. I feel like when a lot of authors do books with characters of color, there is some horrible thing that happens. With Acevedo’s books there’s always hope, that if some bad thing happens it won’t scar them.
BOOKS: What other books with characters of color have you found like that?
CRAFT: Renee Watson’s “Piecing Me Together” and Ibi Zoboi’s “American Street,” though that did have some bad stuff happen. Not that every book has to be all sunshine and ponies, but I feel with African-American authors there’s not enough sunshine and ponies. The books usually have one of the big three: slavery, civil rights, or police brutality. Anytime I find something that doesn’t involve those at all, I’m happy.
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BOOKS: When did you start reading graphic novels?
CRAFT: As a kid I loved reading comic books, but my teachers thought they would rot your brain so they would confiscate them. My young brain interpreted that this way: fun reading was illegal, and the stuff you read at school had to be painful. That is why I shied away from reading.
BOOKS: When did you become a reader?
CRAFT: In my thirties. This guy I never heard of e-mailed me and asked to swap books. I sent him my book of comic strips, and he sends me two 400-page novels. I was like, “Holy crap, now I have to read these.” It was the best-selling writer Eric Jerome Dickey. I was working at Sports Illustrated for Kids and read them on my commute to the city. When I finished “Sister, Sister” and “Friends & Lovers,” I was like, “Oh my god, I did that.” I had friends who always talked about how certain books had changed their lives. The concept of a book changing my life wasn’t in my realm of possibilities. I started catching up specifically on African-American classics. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” was a huge one for me.
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BOOKS: What else did you read once you got going?
CRAFT: In the nineties there was an African-American bookstore in Brooklyn called Nkiru Books with two young guys behind the counter, one of whom became a successful rapper, Talib Kweli, and they’d recommend books, like “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines.
BOOKS: Are your sons readers?
CRAFT: Yes. I made sure to read to them every night. We graduated from Dr. Seuss to authors like Eric Velásquez, who wrote “Grandma’s Records” and “Octopus Stew,” and then to chapter books. I started looking for books with these stickers on them, even though I really didn’t understand those were awards. So books like Louis Sachar’s “Holes” and Christopher Paul Curtis’s “Bud, Not Buddy.” My sons would ask to go to the bookstore on the date one of Jeff Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books was coming out. I was like, “You know when a book is coming out? Whose son are you?”
Follow us on Facebook or Twitter @GlobeBiblio. Amy Sutherland is the author, most recently, of “Rescuing Penny Jane’’ and she can be reached at amysutherland@mac.com
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April 10, 2020 at 05:03AM
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Jerry Craft on graphic novels, raising readers - The Boston Globe
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