"A Reason to Build Community"

My Visit with Artist Danica Novgorodoff

Danica Novgorodoff is a graphic novelist, painter, illustrator, graphic designer, and writer from Brooklyn, New York, and Louisville, Kentucky. Her 2020 graphic novel adaptation of Jason Reynolds’s Long Way Down is extraordinary (my son, a cartooning major, was a big fan) and won a Kate Greenaway medal. Her graphic novels are listed below, and (drumroll) she has a new book out! I was really excited to talk to Danica, who moved back to Louisville a few years ago.

BB: Tell my readers about your work. I know you as an illustrator and graphic novelist, but you are also a painter. How did your work evolve? What does your art practice look like?

DN: I would call myself an artist and writer, with a strong focus on graphic novels. I studied painting and photography in college and gravitated toward graphic storytelling afterwards. For the past two decades, I’ve been working in that field—including children’s books, graphic adaptations of other people’s writing, illustration, handmade folding books, and other forms of text/image combinations.

Within any one project, I might spend months or even years with my attention tuned toward the writing phase or the drawing phase, so that’s always a bit in flux. Graphic novels are extremely time consuming to create, so while I wish I could keep up several creative pursuits at once, it’s hard to make time for everything.

I do try to maintain a drawing/painting practice outside of my book projects, because I feel like that’s where experimentation is more possible. Even if it’s only once every few months.

BB: Let’s talk about your new book! What is it about, how did it begin, what was the process?

DN: A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis is a graphic novel about four real-life youth climate activists and how they came together in New York City in 2019 to organize the largest climate protest in history. It’s also an accessible and comprehensive look at the many factors that contribute to climate change and the solutions available to mitigate it.

I wanted to create a graphic novel that would be appealing to both young readers and adults, and would tell a compelling human story simultaneously rich in scientific information and cultural context. My collaborator, Meera Subramanian, is an environmental journalist who has a lot of experience with interviewing fascinating people and turning facts into stories. In 2019, I attended the NYC Youth Climate Strike with my one-month-old baby, and Meera had the idea to use that event as a focal point for the book. Once we figured out who we wanted to feature, we interviewed the youth activists and Meera crafted a script that told each youth’s backstory—where they came from, how they got involved in climate action, what motivated them. These kids are incredibly inspiring! At a young age, many lived through extreme weather events and turned those traumatic experiences into a reason to build community and take action.

Between the youth activists’ stories, we interspersed “interludes” that tell some of the big-picture context on subjects like species extinction, climate grief, environmental justice, misinformation campaigns by fossil fuel companies, the role of religion in climate action, and solutions.

Meera and Danica and their book!

In terms of process, Meera wrote the script and we edited it together before I started the drawings for the book. Each page took a couple days to draw, so we wanted to be sure we had the story down before I began the artwork. I used a combination of digital drawing tools and watercolor to make the images. From the initial idea to the published book, the entire process took about nine years!

BB: Nine years! That’s incredible. That must take so much devotion and patience. Speaking of devotion and patience, how do you balance writing and motherhood?

DN: I don’t know! It never quite feels balanced. If only there were more time for both. I feel like I struggle every day to meet the urgent needs of domestic life and the vital needs of creative life, and to not let the former eclipse the latter.

I am, by the way, currently working on a book on exactly this topic. It’s called Tsunamis: A Memoir of Art and Motherhood, and will come out in 2027 from Seven Stories Press. It’s taking me a long time to make this book because of…motherhood.

BB: I get it. And many of my readers will too! I’m curious, has your work changed in any way at midlife? Or do you see it changing?

DN: I think my work has become more personal—I’ve had the chance with a few recent projects (including A Better World and Tsunamis mentioned above) to create art about the topics I’m obsessed with and to include my own story in them. I also think about death much more often, and have a lot fewer work hours in my day than I did pre-kids, so I try to be more intentional about which projects I choose to spend my time on.

BB: Let’s talk about geography. You were in New York for awhile but moved back to Louisville. What’s that been like?

DN: I moved to New York in my mid-twenties and lived there for about sixteen years. It was the longest I’d ever lived in any one place in my life, so definitely felt like home and was hard to leave. But shortly after my partner and I had our second child, Covid shut the city down. We left New York to visit my parents in Kentucky and ended up staying. New York had become too expensive for us with two children anyway, but the move was more sudden than expected!

Louisville has been lovely. My partner plays banjo and has become very involved in the music community, we are able to live in a house with family nearby, and we have much more access to nature than we used to. I do, however, miss my New York friends, my many favorite museums, the relentless creativity and strange chance encounters of the city.

BB: Finally, what inspires you right now?

DN: The youth climate activists featured in our book, who are working for positive change and against the capitalist institutions of our political system and corporate America, are so inspiring. Also the older generation of activists who have been doing this work for many decades and continue to show up and put their time and energy and bodies out there for justice. It’s great to see so many people working on a local level to make real change in their communities. The natural world always inspires me with all its beauty and wonder. And of course, people who continue to make art even when times are dark—those singing resistance, those painting and writing and performing and so on—make me feel hopeful and alive.

BB: Thanks for taking the time and talking to us!

Reader, you can find A Better World Is Possible at your local bookstore or the online retailers. (It’s on sale right now on Bookshop.org!) It’s hopeful and energizing and just what we need.

To read more of Danica’s work, check out her website. Graphic novels include:

Long Way Down (adapted from Jason Reynolds’ novel),

The Undertaking of Lily Chen,

Refresh Refresh,

Slow Storm,

and A Late Freeze.

And her picture books include:

Alexander von Humboldt: Explorer, Naturalist, and Environmental Pioneer,

and Not a Cat: a memoir, written by Winter Miller

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I don’t know about you, but I’m so happy it’s finally Spring in New York (let’s hope), and maybe, just maybe, things are looking up? If you’re in New York and you have yet to see Becky Shaw, what are you waiting for?

Love,
Brooke