Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Agent, civil rights, graphic novel, Little Brown Ink, Meg Selkey, Ruby Bridges
Be Brave, Ruby B!, A Civil Rights Graphic Novel By Meg Selkey For 2027
Be Brave, Ruby B!, a Civil Rights graphic novel by Meg Selkey, about students researching Ruby Bridges, for 2027
Article Summary
- Be Brave, Ruby B! is a 2027 middle-grade graphic novel about students researching Ruby Bridges and civil rights.
- Three seventh-grade girls face school board backlash when their Ruby Bridges project is branded controversial.
- The story blends sequential comics with diary-style interstitials as the girls decide whether to speak up.
- Little, Brown Ink acquired Meg Selkey’s Ruby Bridges graphic novel for August 2027, edited by Rachel Stark.
Be Brave, Ruby B! is a new middle-grade graphic novel by Meg Selkey created in collaboration with the Center for Cartoon Studies. The story follows three seventh-grade girls who begin researching Ruby Bridges, the civil rights pioneer who, as a six-year-old in 1960, became the first Black child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in the South. What starts as a school project takes on new urgency when the local school board labels their work “controversial” and attempts to shut it down. Faced with institutional pushback, the girls must decide whether to back down or find the courage to stand up for what they believe is right. The graphic novel will incorporate diary-format interstitials alongside traditional sequential storytelling.
Little, Brown Ink has acquired world rights to Be Brave, Ruby B! for publication in August 2027. The deal was made by Andrea Colvin during her time at the publisher, with Rachel Stark set to edit the project. Meg Selkey’s agent Judy Hansen of Hansen Literary Agency negotiated the sale.
Meg Selkey is a graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies, and her thesis project was Between, a multi-chapter comic that traces a friend group exclusively through their sleepovers, spanning from young childhood into the teen years. It examines the messier sides of adolescent relationships, including codependency, microaggressions, sexuality, and awkward feelings, as people grow apart and reconnect over time. Her other work includesSofa King as seen in the 2023 ShortBox Comics Fair, and was a 2024 MICE Mini-Grant awardee, about Krishna, who struggles to fit in with a group of girls filming a lip-sync video, Dunk, a slice-of-life short about two girls playing a game in a pool, Mothering on the intersection of being an artist and the desire to become a mother, and more.
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