This image by Simone Martin-Newberry accompanied Danez Smith’s January 2021 review of Robert Jones Jr.’s debut novel, “The Prophets.” In their poetic and personal review, Smith describes Jones’s book as, “an often lyrical and rebellious love story embedded within a tender call-out to Black readers, reaching across time and form to shake something old, mighty in the blood.” The highly anticipated book tells the story of Isaiah and Samuel, two enslaved boys on the Halifax plantation, who “In each other, find a love that brings peace to the hearts of the many enslaved people on the plantation, until they are betrayed by a fellow enslaved man …”
Simone Martin-Newberry is an artist and digital illustrator who centers Black bodies and bodies of color within color-rich environments and histories. Her work is guided by a focus on discovering and uncovering spaces where Black bodies can belong, and on creating worlds where color is the norm, the majority, and not the exception to the rule. Her art-making practice is rooted in her experience growing up the daughter of an artist and elementary school teacher who challenged students to always flood their canvases with color, leaving no white of the page visible. Simone’s illustrative work has been commissioned and featured by The New York Times, The Guardian US, The Washington Post, NPR, Emergence Magazine, Chronicle Books, Random House, Workman Publishing, Chicago Public Library, Southern Poverty Law Center, Malala Fund and many others.
