The High Desert: Black. Punk. Nowhere.

Winner of a 2022 ALA Alex Award Winner of the 2023 Cartoonist Studio Prize for Print Comics One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2022 * One of NYPL's Best Books of 2022 *A Publishers Weekly "Best Book of 2022"  A formative coming-of-age graphic memoir by the creator of Afro-punk: a young man’s immersive reckoning with identity, racism, clumsy teen love and belonging in an isolated California desert, and a search for salvation and community through punk. Apple Valley, California, in the late eighties, a thirsty, miserable desert. Teenage James Spooner hates that he and his mom are back in town after years away. The one silver lining—new school, new you, right? But the few Black kids at school seem to be gangbanging, and the other kids fall on a spectrum of micro-aggressors to future Neo-Nazis. Mixed race, acutely aware of his Blackness, James doesn't know where he fits until he meets Ty, a young Black punk who introduces him to the school outsiders—skaters, unhappy yo