Ebony Flowers’s A Sketch of Sunday

“My mother had the loveliest handwriting,” says the cartoonist and educator Ebony Flowers. “She wrote for the Maryland Gazette as her second job, and wrote everything by hand before typing it. I learned to make comics by hand and have stuck with this way of working partly because of watching her.” For the December installment of Drawn to MoMA, Flowers—whose debut graphic novel Hot Comb (2019) won Eisner and Ignatz awards and the Believer Book Award—created a story about this formative childhood experience. “I grew up in a solidly working-class household, where both parents worked two jobs to make ends meet,” she says. “We did not consider ourselves an artistic family. I hope anyone who believes something like this will read my comic and consider their family’s artistic expressions, which they might have otherwise dismissed as mere labor.”

Ebony Flowers is an assistant professor of creative writing at Wake Forest University. Her award-winning graphic novel Hot Comb appeared on best-of-the-year lists from the Washington Post, the Guardian, and National Public Radio. She lives in Winston-Salem, NC, with her family.

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