July 2, 2018

Melanie Gillman with their Stonewall Book Award

The first volume of Melanie Gillman’s As the Crow Flies (Iron Circus) recently won the Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association (ALA). The comic, originally published online where it is still updating, is about Charlie Lamonte, a thirtee-year-old, queer, black girl spending a week of summer vacation at an all-white Christian youth backpacking camp where they learn to question the rhetoric. Melanie ′12 gave a speech at the ALA Annual Conference and Exhibition upon receiving the award in New Orleans. You can view their heartfelt speech on Twitter. They discuss how important comics in particular are in sharing experiences:

Drawings are still, even in our advanced stage of technology, the most direct way that we have as human beings to be able to see visually through another human being’s eyes.

ALA is the oldest and largest library association in the world. Founded in 1876, ALA has been awarding the Stonewall Book Award for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GBLT) books since 1971. This year, As the Crow Flies was the only graphic novel up for the prize.

As Michelle Ollie, CCS president, said after getting the opportunity to spend a few days with Melanie in Vermont again this week while they were teaching at CCS, “I’m amazed at their generosity and commitment to comics and the community.” So it comes as no big surprise that, at the end of their speech, Melanie issued this hopeful challenge to all librarians and book stores and everyone else working with children:

The challenge that I wanted to give you all is to take the love that you’ve poured into my book, and that I’m so incredibly grateful for, and pay it forward to other people that are out there doing the work, because there are so many of us, but there are still a number of gate keepers that are keeping us out of traditional publishing and distribution, book stores and libraries where children can find our books.

Page 4 of As the Crow Flies

And it looks as though it will work. In addition to the Stonewall Award and great reviews, As the Crow Flies won the Excellence in Graphic Literature Award for Middle Grade Books at Denver ComiCon, beating out 80 other titles. And it has been nominated for the 2019 Amelia Bloomer List, an ALA-curated list of recommending feminist lit for young readers.

Post by Angela Boyle ′16.