Ebony Flowers chosen as a 2026 Howard Foundation Fellow

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Ebony Flowers was recently selected as a 2026 Howard Foundation Fellow. The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation is an independent agency administered by Brown University that grants annual unrestricted fellowships to support the intellectual and artistic growth of early- to mid-career individuals. The Howard Foundation was officially established in 1952 and offered its first fellowship in 1954, providing non-residency fellowships to aid the intellectual and artistic development of recipients. 

With her project titled, Awake Overnight, Flowers is one of 14 recipients of the fellowship, which aims to advance independent, creative, and scholarly work. 

Flowers is a cartoonist and educator who joined Wake Forest’s Department of English in 2024 and teaches Making Comics and Advanced Fiction. In 2024, she was a McCausland Visiting Scholar at the University of South Carolina. In 2022, she was named the Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow as part of the 2022-23 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program. 

Her fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, MOMA magazine, and The Paris Review. She is under contract to write Baltimore Brownfield, to be published in 2027. 

Flowers is a 2017 Rona Jaffe Award recipient. Hot Comb, her debut book, appeared on best-of-2019 lists from the Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, and the New York Public Library. Hot Comb won the Eisner, Ignatz, and Believer Book Award, and received nominations for numerous others, including the NAACP Image Award and the YALSA Alex Awards. She is also a 2020 Ignatz Award recipient for Outstanding Graphic Novel, a 2020 Believer Award recipient for Fiction, and a 2020 Eisner Award recipient for Best Short Story. 

She earned a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Bachelor of Arts in Biological Anthropology from the University of Maryland College Park.

Learn more about the 2026 Howard Foundation Fellowship.