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Virtual Event – Alverne Ball & Stacey Robinson
May 20, 2021 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Magic City Books is proud to welcome Alverne Ball and Stacey Robinson for a virtual event in celebration of their new graphic novel, 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 in their book, Across the Tracks. Also known as Black Wall Street, Greenwood was a community whose importance is often overshadowed by the massacre that took place one hundred years ago. Across the Tracks offers a thorough examination of the rise, fall, and rebirth of Black Wall Street.
Dexter Nelson, Manager of Exhibits & Curator of Comic Books at OKPOP Museum will be our moderator for the event.
This free event will be hosted on the Zoom platform and Facebook Live. To register in advance for the event on Zoom visit: https://magiccitybooks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ON4VZgCBRn2ubJ0nhnx0nw.
After registering you will receive a confirmation email with details on how to join on Thursday May 20 at 7:00 pm CT.
Across the Tracks is available now at Magic City Books and online here: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/across-the-tracks/506.
About Across the Tracks
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.
Alverne Ball has an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia College Chicago. He is the recipient of the 2014 and 2015 Glyph Rising Star Award for his writing on One Nation: Old Druids. In 2009, he received the first-ever Luminarts graphic novel writing award. Ball lives in Joliet, Illinois.
Stacey Robinson is an assistant professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As part of the collaborative team Black Kirby with artist John Jennings, Robinson creates graphic novels, gallery exhibitions, lectures, and workshops that use strategies to imagine new worlds inspired by design, hip-hop, the arts and sciences, and diasporic African belief systems
