Writer lifts her voice to help ‘beloved hometown’
Ewing’s writing talent is behind Marvel Comics’ ‘Ironheart,’ out Nov. 28
CHICAGO — On Twitter, where she has amassed more than 173,000 followers, Eve Ewing describes herself as a “black girl from space via Chicago.”
But on a recent afternoon, she was in a favorite Mexican cafe here, dealing with a distinctly earthbound problem: parking.
She rushed in, then rushed out again to take care of things, but not before delivering a mini-riff on civil disobedience, karma and the politics of the city’s privatized meter system. “Today,” she said, at last in her seat, “is not the day to get a ticket.”
Ewing, 32, can be a hard woman to slow down, keep track of, or sum up. To keep it simple, you could just say she’s a sociologist at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration, with a new book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, out this week.
But that would leave out the seemingly million other things she is doing.
In the past year, she has also published an acclaimed book of poetry; collaborated on a play about poet Gwendolyn Brooks; and co-hosted the Chicago Poetry Block Party, a community festival she helped create. She also sold a novel, coming in 2020; signed up as a consulting producer on W. Kamau Bell’s CNN series, United Shades of America; and began hosting a new podcast, “Bughouse Square,” inspired by the archives of another Chicago gadfly, Studs Terkel.
And then there’s her gig with Marvel Comics. In August, Ewing announced that she had been hired to write Ironheart, the first solo title featuring its character Riri Williams, a black girl genius from Chicago.
It’s tempting to see Ewing, who holds a doctorate from Harvard, as a grown-up version of Riri, a prodigy who builds her own Iron Man suit in her MIT dorm room.
But even if she playfully campaigned for the job with tweets pointing out their commonalities, she discourages pushing the analogy too far.
“I never want to be seen as a hero,” she said over lunch. “I want to be seen as someone who is always concerned with making space for everyone to play their part, as opposed to someone who has superpowers and fixes everything.”
Everything from Ironheart (out Nov. 28) to the block party, she likes to say, is really part of one big project: helping to build a better version of what she calls her “beautiful, hideous, deeply flawed, lovely, violent, endearing, maligned, beloved hometown.”
In Ghosts in the Schoolyard, published by the University of Chicago Press, Ewing uses social science to dive into the 2013 plan to close schools that resulted in the shuttering of 49 public schools, most of them in African-American neighborhoods.
It is a scholarly book, and also an unabashedly personal one. It focuses on Bronzeville, the African-American neighborhood on the South Side, where Ewing taught middle school after graduating from the University of Chicago.
She looks at the history of discriminatory housing and education policies that gave rise to segregated, unequal, often overcrowded schools,.
She also analyzes the community pushback against the closings (including a 34-day hunger strike), asking: “If the schools were so terrible, why did people fight for them so adamantly?”
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, the Harvard scholar of education who supervised Ewing’s dissertation research, called it a “wonderfully probing” book.
“The literature on school closings, and even on school reform that supposes there must be closings, rarely considers what Eve considers: How do people experience this?” she said.