Stacey A. Robinson
Author of
Across the Tracks: Remembering Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the Tulsa Race Massacre written by Alverne Ball, illustrated by Stacey Robinson (Abrams Books, 2021)
I Am Alfonso Jones written by Tony Medina, illustrated by John Jennings and Stacey Robinson (Lee & Low Books, 2017)
Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners written by James Braxton Peterson, illustrated by John Jennings and Stacey Robinson (Beginners Books, 2016)
Stacey Robinson is an Associate Professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a 2019-2020 Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research who completed his Masters of Fine Art at the University at Buffalo in 2015. For the last several years he has traveled internationally discussing the complexities of decolonized future spaces. As one half of the collaborative team “Black Kirby” with artist John Jennings, Stacey creates graphic novels, gallery exhibitions, lectures, and workshops that use world-building strategies to imagine new worlds inspired by Design, Hip-Hop, the Arts and Sciences, and diasporic African belief systems. His latest graphic novels are, ‘I Am Alfonso Jones’ written by Tony Medina (2017) is available from Lee & Low Books, and ‘Across the Tracks: Remembering Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the Tulsa Race Massacre’, written Alverne Ball (2021) is available from Abrams Books. Recently exhibitions include: Ascension of Black Stillness (CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY) and The Black Angel of History (Carnegie Hall’s ‘Afrofuturism Festival) in 2022.
Books by Stacey Robinson
Across the Tracks: Remembering Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the Tulsa Race Massacre written by Alverne Ball, illustrated by Sacey Robinson (Abrams Books, 2021)
One hundred years after the Tulsa Race Massacre, Across the Tracks is a celebration and memorial of Greenwood, Oklahoma
In Across the Tracks: Remembering Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the Tulsa Race Massacre, author Alverne Ball and illustrator Stacey Robinson have crafted a love letter to Greenwood, Oklahoma. Also known as Black Wall Street, Greenwood was a community whose importance is often overshadowed by the atrocious massacre that took place there in 1921.
Across the Tracks introduces the reader to the businesses and townsfolk who flourished in this unprecedented time of prosperity for Black Americans. We learn about Greenwood and why it is essential to remember the great achievements of the community as well as the tragedy which nearly erased it. However, Ball is careful to recount the eventual recovery of Greenwood. With additional supplementary materials including a detailed preface, timeline, and historical essay, Across the Tracks offers a thorough examination of the rise, fall, and rebirth of Black Wall Street.
I Am Alfonso Jones written by Tony Medina, illustrated by Stacey Robinson & John Jennings (Lee & Low Books, 2017)
Named to the 2018 Top Ten Great Graphic Novels for Teens list (Young Adult Library Services Association) and the New York Public Library’s list of Best Books for Teens.
Alfonso Jones can’t wait to play the role of Hamlet in his school’s hip-hop rendition of the classic Shakespearean play. He also wants to let his best friend, Danetta, know how he really feels about her. But as he is buying his first suit, an off-duty police officer mistakes a clothes hanger for a gun, and he shoots Alfonso.
When Alfonso wakes up in the afterlife, he’s on a ghost train guided by well-known victims of police shootings, who teach him what he needs to know about this subterranean spiritual world. Meanwhile, Alfonso’s family and friends struggle with their grief and seek justice for Alfonso in the streets. As they confront their new realities, both Alfonso and those he loves realize the work that lies ahead in the fight for justice.
In the first graphic novel for young readers to focus on police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, as in Hamlet, the dead shall speak--and the living yield even more surprises.
Featuring a foreword by Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy.
Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners (Beginners Books, 2016)
A graphic narrative project that attempts to distill the fundamental components of what scholars, activists, and artists have identified as the Mass Incarceration movement in the United States.
Since the early 1990s, activist critics of the US prison system have marked its emergence as a “complex” in a manner comparable to how President Eisenhower described the Military Industrial Complex. Like its institutional “cousin,” the Prison Industrial Complex features a critical combination of political ideology, far-reaching federal policy, and the neo-liberal directive to privatize institutions traditionally within the purview of the government. The result is that corporations have capital incentives to capture and contain human bodies.
The Prison Industrial Complex relies on the “law and order” ideology fomented by President Nixon and developed at least partially in response to the unrest generated through the Civil Rights Movement. It is (and has been) enhanced and emboldened via the US “war on drugs,” a slate of policies that by any account have failed to do anything except normalize the warehousing of nonviolent substance abusers in jails and prisons that serve more as criminal training centers then as redemptive spaces for citizens who might re-enter society successfully.
Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a primer for how these issues emerged and how our awareness of the systems at work in mass incarceration might be the very first step in reforming an institution responsible for some of our most egregious contemporary civil rights violations.