Sophie L. Riemenschneider is a third year English Ph.D. student at the City University of New York. She studies literature of 9/11, comics, autobiography, trauma and memory theory, and feminist writing. She is especially interested in how the lived experience gets translated onto the page, and how we communicate those lived experiences to each other, either through words, images, or oral retellings. Before moving back to her native New York for graduate school, she lived in Chicago, where she taught high school special education. She lives with her fiancé and super adorable but super spoiled cat Bleecker.  ​

A Brief Introduction to This Project

Though I've divided my annotated bibliography into a few different categories, many of the comics listed here fit into multiple categories; many of the YA comics, for example, are also dystopian, just as many of the comics were originally published online. 

​I also want to discuss a couple other trends I noticed while putting this whole thing together. First of all, the internet has been a tremendous boon to the production and dissemination of comics by black women; I found so many webcomics by black women that I had to divide them into two separate categories, serialized and short webcomics. Many of the comics listed in other categories also started as webcomics before being picked up by a publisher. In interviews, many of the artists listed here talked about creating their work in an effort to fill voids that they felt growing up; that they loved manga, for example, or superhero comics, but never saw themselves represented. And so they took matters into their own hands and drew themselves into the very stories that they wanted to be seen in. The internet has provided a platform to do that. As more and more comics by black women become visible, both online and in print, more and more comics will be written by black women, who will feel empowered by their foremothers; I think that's why so many of the comics were published in the last five years or so. And that leads me into my second observation: putting this list together, I am simply awed by the tenacity that these women have in taking matters so frankly into their own hands. They wrote the stories they wanted to read; they created the characters they wanted to see; some of them even created their own publishing houses. Thank you to all these badass, creative women for putting their work into the world. I have truly enjoyed reading it. 

I also want to thank Sheena C. Howard for her Encyclopedia of Black Comics-- it was a truly invaluable resource when I was starting out with this project. And thanks to Kashema, for referring me to it :)