Author, illustrator, and nice guy (according to his slide deck) Jerry Craft visited MICDS on Monday, March 31! He met with fourth grade and Middle School students at one assembly before heading to Brauer Auditorium to present at an Upper School assembly. Later, he spent time with Middle School students in a writing workshop.
Middle School Librarian Bethany Kavanaugh introduced Craft:
We are thrilled to welcome Jerry Craft to MICDS Middle School! Jerry is an award-winning author and illustrator, best known for his graphic novels New Kid, Class Act, and School Trip.
Graphic novels are not just books—they are a powerful blend of storytelling and visual art. The story is told not only through words but also through illustrations that bring emotions, actions, and experiences to life in a way that words alone cannot. The combination of text and images allows readers to connect with characters and situations on a deeper level, which in stories like New Kid, makes complex themes like identity, friendship, and belonging even more accessible and engaging. Mr. Craft’s work is a prime example of how graphic novels open doors for readers of all backgrounds and ages to see the world through new experiences. We’re excited to hear from Jerry and explore how his graphic novels continue to inspire and influence readers everywhere.
Craft started by asking how many students like to draw, write, and read. He explained that when he was young, he would have raised both hands if asked if he liked drawing and one hand if he liked writing. “Reading? I sat on both my hands,” he said. “I hated reading books. How did someone who hated reading as much as I did become an author? I have no idea!”
He showed a photo of his seventh-grade Spanish homework, which was more drawing than Spanish. He described how he drew on everything: textbooks, homework, and even desks. “I wanted to be the next great artist of superheroes.” He used copy paper to draw his comics, folding and stapling them to make books.
“As a reader, I went from Dr. Seuss to Marvel Comics to almost nothing,” he admitted. “Teachers hated us reading comics and thought they would warp our little brains, so they took them from us and replaced them with books like these.” His slide showed An American Tragedy, The Jungle, As I Lay Dying, and Great Expectations. He pointed toward An American Tragedy and said, “The great tragedy is that it’s 800 pages long.”
As a young African American boy growing up in Washington Heights, New York, he noticed that most books didn’t have characters who looked like him. “Great Expectations at least had a kid, and I was a kid, so that was a nice change. So I kind of related to that kid. I was a young, Black kid from Harlem relating to a 12-year-old kid from England named Pip. That’s when I realized that stories can be universal.” He also figured out that he could get through long books by dividing and conquering, calculating that if he read 20 pages each moring and 20 pages each night, that was 40 pages a day, and if he could keep that up, he could read a 400 page book in 10 days, which is how he got through Great Expectations.
Craft began creating comic strips, finding inspiration in the world around him. “We have two ears, two eyes, and one mouth. We should listen and see twice as much as we talk,” he advised. “Look and listen. I’m always looking and listening.” He explained that comic strips stimulate readers’ brains in two ways: verbally and visually. “Your brain has to put the words and the pictures together like a puzzle. They mean nothing without each other.”
Craft also shared that his journey was a series of steps. After drawing and writing comic strips, he wanted to do a book. He made 250 comic strips, put them together in book form, and sent them all over the country to different publishers. He was hoping one would like his work and offer a contract. “The first letter in the mail was a rejection,” he shared. “The second letter—fingers crossed, eyes crossed—was a rejection. ‘Dear Mr. Craft, don’t quit your day job.’ Third letter? Rejection. All I ever got was rejected and rejected and rejected.” All that rejection was hard, but Craft never gave up. “There are times in your life when people aren’t going to believe in you. Find a way to believe in yourself, keep moving forward, and keep climbing that ladder.” Undeterred, he went to the library and checked out a book on how to self-publish. He published his first book, called Mama’s Boyz: as American as Sweet Potato Pie, and set about going to book fairs and publishers trying to sell copies. Other authors approached him after also being rejected by big publishers and asked for help, and before he knew it, he was a small publisher. “Sometimes it’s really easy to stay in your safe space and not go out of it,” he said. “But I knew how to make a cover, how to do the layout, create the barcode, the ISBN, even those boring pages in the beginning that no one knows what they mean except for librarians. If I don’t believe in me, who else is going to believe in me? So why not?” In 2007, he began his own publishing company and produced 20-30 books over the next 20 years.
He found new inspiration when he became a father. As his children grew, he learned about bullying and decided to write a book about it. “Everyone else writes about being bullied, but I wanted to flip it around and write about the kids who do the bullying,” he said. He reached out to a friend whom he considered a “real author” and convinced him to co-write the book. Craft wrote the first chapter and sent it to his friend to write the second. He waited and waited, and then wrote the second chapter himself and sent it to his friend to write the third. After waiting some more, he wrote and sent the third chapter and waited for the fourth. Then he wrote the next four chapters and realized that he could actually write the entire thing himself.
His book had five kids who bullied others until they got special powers that made them like the students they were bullying. He called them The Offenders, and the story centered around their transformations and how they ended up being teased and learning what it felt like. His kids were his beta readers. “I would read the story to my kids when they got home from school. My son would say, ‘Wait, what did that say? No kid would sound like that!'” Craft realized he needed to do more listening, learning how kids talk, how they interact, and even how they sit. “I put all that in my book,” he said. Because he leaned so heavily on his children to write the book, they get co-author credit right on the cover!
In 2014, Scholastic reached out to him, asking him to illustrate a book. He, of course, accepted, realizing a lifelong dream. While there, he read some middle-grade graphic novels, including Smile by Raina Telgemeier, and realized that this was his next step forward as an author. “I had to write and draw a 250-page graphic novel,” he said. “I have the same doubts you do! So, I started small. I took my Mama’s Boyz book and turned it into a 96-page graphic novel and thought, ‘If I can do that, I can do 250 pages.'” He got to work, and his first middle-grade graphic novel, New Kid, was published.
New Kid is a story about a boy named Jordan who wants to be an artist. His parents have higher ambitions for their son, so they send him to an elite independent school called Riverdale. Jordan’s story very closely matches Craft’s. Even Jordan’s house looks like Craft’s childhood home. “I wanted to fight what is called the single story narrative,” Craft explained. “Most books with kids like me were either history or misery. I wanted to change that narrative.”
He put together his book proposal, got an agent and a publisher, and set to work drawing and telling Jordan’s story. He wrote from about 10 a.m. until 1 or 2 in the morning every day for over a year. Then, he had to work on a cover. After putting together a montage of all the different middle-grade graphic novel covers he could find, he realized they all looked similar with pastel backgrounds. He set out to make New Kid different, so he went with black and white. He also notes that publishing a graphic novel is about more than the drawing and writing; it’s a lot about the redrawing and rewriting.
“I got a contract after 30 years,” he said. What’s the lesson? “You gotta finish your stuff. Whether you’ve been working on it for six months or six years, you have to finish it and learn from it.”
What he learned from writing New Kid was that the way a character starts a book isn’t necessarily the way they end it. In Jordan’s case, he started at a new school and was the new kid in the class. By the end, his experience has transformed him, and he is a whole “new kid.”
“After I handed it in, it took a year to come out,” he said. New Kid was published in February 2019. “Then the coolest thing ever was on the cover. Jeff Kinney, author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, had a blurb on the cover. What could be cooler?”
A year after that, Craft got an early morning call letting him know he had won the John Newbery Medal for the “most distinguished American children’s book published the previous year.” He likened it to winning an Oscar, an Emmy, or the Superbowl. I didn’t know what a big deal this was,” he admitted. It was indeed a big deal. New Kid is the first and only graphic novel to win the Newberry, and only four African American artists had ever won at that point. Later that same morning, he received more good news: he had also won the Coretta Scott King Author Award. He added a Kirkus Prize to the mix, becoming the only author in history to win all three awards.
“Now I have small dreams, medium dreams, large dreams, extra large dreams, and super-size dreams,” he said. “I never dreamt of being a New York Times bestselling author. Or that my books would be translated into dozens of different languages.” Craft spent the month of February in Singapore and Taiwan, signing books and talking to students through an interpreter.
After New Kid, he wrote a sequel: Class Act. He created a “READ” poster, which he finds ironic since he hated reading when he was a child. He has also created merchandise like t-shirts, sketchbooks, hoodies, and a jigsaw puzzle.
“What could go wrong?” he asked. Well, in October 2021, a Texas woman collected 450 signatures to ban Craft’s book in her community and to keep him from doing presentations to students. Craft went from promoting his book to fighting book bans, conducting interviews with national and local media. “What are you going to do?” he was asked. “I have no choice…I have to do a third book!”
School Trip sees Jordan and his friends take a journey to Paris. Craft was back to doing interviews about his work. “I was not going to let these naysayers take me out of my game,” he said. “I had to refocus and reposition myself to stay positive. Regardless of what a few people think, I’m talking to schools literally around the world, and that means a thousand times more than someone who hasn’t even read the book but wants to criticize it.”
More of Craft’s dreams came true when Marvel Comics reached out. In response, he wrote a foreword for a Fantastic Four anthology and a six-page Black Panther story for Marvel Super Stories. His Black Panther fights book bans, of course! Then, author Kwame Alexander—another favorite of MICDS students—proposed partnering on a book. Craft and Alexander’s book, J Versus K, which features fifth-grade versions of both authors, will be out next month. In the story, two kids enter their school’s storytelling contest and become bitter rivals. Craft notes that he and Alexander are great friends even while they compete with each other for readers. “You can be rivals and still like each other,” he said. “You compete and make each other better.”
Craft also revealed that basketball star LeBron James has teamed up with Universal Studios to produce an adaptation of New Kid. “This is for all the kids who hated to read…so dream bigger!” he said.
He ended both presentations by demonstrating how drawing is simply a compilation of a series of shapes and even letters. He quickly sketched a face, and then Charlie Brown and Snoopy, much to the delight of the students. “These shapes by themselves are not difficult. When you put them all together, it starts to make sense,” he said.
“I look for reasons why I can do stuff, not for reasons why I can’t. If you can do what you love for a living, you’ll never work a day in your life. When I flew here to talk to you, I drew on the plane on my iPad. I like quiet when I’m writing, but I can watch or listen to anything when I’m drawing. Look at things you like to do, and look for people out there doing that thing.”
Later that day, Craft spent time with middle school students in a writing workshop. He took a poll of writers and artists, and drew characters and story writing theories on the whiteboard. He and the students played out a story for a zombie apocalypse within the room, and Craft shared his process for story building with everyday thoughts: I see a school bus—are there zombies on it? “You can’t stare at a blank screen and write,” he said. “The more casual time you give yourself, the better it will be.” He noted that when fans ask recurring questions about characters in one book, it feeds content for the next book and how he’ll build out those characters and the story/resolution.
He opened the floor to questions and discussion topics. The students asked a variety of great questions:
How did you keep going after so much rejection?
Because I love to do it, and I’m going to find a way to do it. I magnify the positive.
What do you do when you have writer’s block?
I normally don’t get writer’s block because I always have stuff cooking in the back of my mind.
How do you create characters?
Since it’s a graphic novel, I start with how the characters look. A character’s favorite clothing, hair, face, body features, how he carries his backpack. How heavy is it? How does that affect the way he walks? Does he bounce his leg when he sits? Does he use the word “like” a lot?
Have you gotten any inspiration from visiting St. Louis?
I always ask for the local things to eat. Thin crust pizza, toasted ravioli, gooey butter cake.
What is your favorite Marvel superhero?
As a kid, I liked Spiderman and Silver Surfer. The last few years, Iron Man, Black Panther, Daredevil.
Was it hard to get your book out there when you self-published?
Yes, I had to use social media a lot, and I paid a fee to go sell it at book fairs. We didn’t have print-on-demand back then. I had to order 2,500 copies of Mama’s Boyz, which I had to sell.
When you build outlines for your book, do you start with the plot or the characters first?
It free flows, one character, one setting, and on from there.
Did you have any major characters or story pieces that you had to take out?
I had a Black girl in New Kid who had a story around her hair. I kept trying to keep her in, but it was taking away too much from Jordan.
What an incredible experience for our students! Thank you, Jerry Craft, for sharing your time and talent with our community.