Interviewing John Jennings for Black Perspectives, the blog for the AAIHS

Last month I had the opportunity to interview John Jennings, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and a Cooperating Faculty Member in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Jennings is a scholar and artist whose artistic work is deeply influenced by the African American cultural experience and explores intersectional narratives linked to identity. He illustrated Octavia Butler’s Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation. He recently completed a stint as the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University. While Jennings’ adaptation of Butler’s Kindred has generated excitement, his original creative work highlight a creative intervention designed to celebrate Black culture. Jennings is co-editor of The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival, co-founder and organizer of the Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco and the SOL-CON: The Brown and Black Comix Expo at the Ohio State University. I spoke with him about his latest graphic novel Blue Hand Mojo (Rosarium Publishing), an innovative publishing startup dedicated to bringing multicultural voices to the public.

You can read the interview here.