Ajuan Mance
Ajuan Mance is a Professor of English at Mills College in Oakland, California and a lifelong artist and writer. In both her scholarly writing and her visual art, Ajuan explores the complexities of race, gender, and identity. She has shown her work at exhibitions and festivals from the Bay Area to Brooklyn. Ajuan’s illustrations and comics have appeared in several anthologies, including, most recently, Drawing Power, from Abrams Press, winner of the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Anthology; Menopause: A Comic Treatment, winner of the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Anthology; She Votes, from Chronicle Books; COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology, from Penn State University Press, and others. Her work has also appeared in a number of digital and print media outlets, including, most recently, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Women’s Review of Books, Publisher’s Weekly.com, the NewYorkTimes.com, NewYorker.com, and Literature and Medicine.
Ajuan Mance is a professor of African American literature at Mills College and a lifelong artist and writer. In Ajuan's work as a teacher and scholar of U.S. Black literature and literary history, she focuses on bringing to light those Black lives and legacies that have been overlooked. These same interests inform her work as an artist. Ajuan is especially interested in the ways that telling the stories of the celebrations, struggles, actions, and accomplishments of Black communities and individuals can transform how people of all ethnicities experience themselves and the world around them. Ajuan's portraits are informed by the sights, sounds, and sensations stored up over her years in Black artist, academic, and activist communities. She embraces bright, audacious, and unexpected colors as a way to move beyond entrenched stereotypes to create images that reflect the wonderful complexity of Black lives.
