The whole world opened to me when I learned to read~Mary McCleod Bethune

Once you learn how to read, you will be forever free!~Frederick Douglass

REVIEW Mark Long is a video game designer and producer living in Seattle. The Silence of Our Friends in based on Long’s childhoold experiences with the civil rights movement in suburban Houston, Texas.

Jim Demonakos I hate writing my own bio, I always think it sounds too snotty. I should just have it read “Jim is a human-shaped being. Ish.”

Nate Powell was born in 1978 in Little Rock, Arkansas, and began self-publishing comics in 1992 at age 14. He graduated from School of Visual Arts in 2000.


REVIEW Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of the prize-winning books Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (The Free Press, 2009); Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class (The Free Press, 1994); Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997), which was selected one of the top ten books of 1998 by the Village Voice; Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, written collaboratively with Dana Frank and Howard Zinn (Beacon 2001); and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002). He also edited (with Earl Lewis), To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 2000), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a History Book Club Selection. To Make Our World Anew was an outgrowth of an earlier collaboration with Lewis, the eleven volume Young Oxford History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 1995-1998), of which he authored volume 10, titled Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970 (1996). Kelley also co-edited (with Sidney J. Lemelle) Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (Verso, 1994).