James Spooner is an award-winning graphic novelist, filmmaker, and tattoo artist. His debut graphic novel, The High Desert, was named a Best Book of 2022 by Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, and the New York Public Library. The book went on to receive the American Library Association’s Alex Award and the Cartoonist Studio Prize.
Spooner is the co-editor of Black Punk Now, an anthology of Black punk writers and comic creators. The collection was named one of the top music books of 2023 by Pitchfork, among the top five music books by The Guardian, and received a starred review from Kirkus. His forthcoming hybrid prose-and-comics memoir, It Starts with Anger, will be published by Pantheon Books on August 4.
Spooner directed the seminal documentary Afro-Punk, which premiered at national and international film festivals including the Toronto International Film Festival and the American Black Film Festival. He also co-founded the Afro Punk Festival, which has grown to attract worldwide audiences in the hundreds of thousands. A Kickstarter campaign to restore and preserve Afro-Punk is slated to launch in May.
His work has been featured in outlets including NPR, The Los Angeles Times, Vice, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, MTV, NBC News, and Variety. He is a recipient of the ReNew Media Rockefeller Grant, has served as a guest curator for the Broad Museum in Los Angeles and the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas, and previously programmed for the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
James continues to screen Afro-Punk and give talks on punk, comics, authorship, and Black identity.
SPX Table Pantheon