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Samuel Teer |
Samuel Teer is the author of the 2025 Michael L. Printz Award-winner Brownstone (Versify/Harper), illustrated by Mar Julia, and Veda: Assembly Required. Raised outside of St. Louis, Mo., he lives in Aurora, Colo.
Huge congratulations to you! This is the second graphic novel you have written, is that correct?
It's the second published graphic novel--my first was Veda: Assembly Required--but I've written many, many unpublished graphic novels. LOL.
In an interview, you said the inspiration for this book came from growing up in a trilingual household. Tell us a bit more about that.
I never really thought of it as a trilingual household--a chaotic, loud, and boisterous household, certainly.
Growing up in a trilingual household just made it easier for me to see different types of communication, understanding, and affection from various cultures. That was formative to my upbringing.
Do you still have Spanish and ASL speakers around you in your adult life?
Yes, both of my parents. My collaborator, Mar, speaks Spanish. I also live in a predominantly Latino area. We have a close friend, who we now sadly only intermittently see, that uses ASL predominantly. Despite all of that, my Spanish and ASL are still terrible.
How did the character of Almudena develop? Why did you want to tell this story through her eyes?
Almudena is really me unleashing the 14-year-old girl that lives inside of me. She's bratty but endearing--maybe in ways that I wasn't when I was 14.
Telling the story through her eyes was important because she's an outsider to her relationship with her dad, Xavier, and an outsider to this Latin American community she finds herself in.
I didn't really connect with my own heritage until I was around Almudena's age and went to Guatemala for the first time.
What made you interested in focusing on a character who was raised entirely outside of her Guatemalan heritage?
I mean, that was my upbringing. We had little bits and bobs of Guatemalan aesthetics in the house, but I didn't really connect with my heritage until that summer trip to Guatemala.
It's also a clear entry point for readers to engage with a culture outside of their own.
Almudena's father is kind of a cinnamon roll--a man who made mistakes in his past but is now just doing his best. How did you develop his character?
Xavier as a cinnamon roll is a pretty apt description! I'm going to have to start using that!
Xavier was just going to be that "cinnamon roll" for Almudena. But as I got to scripting the book, I became a foster parent to a 17-year-old LGBTQ+ young woman, so a good deal of Xaiver's anxieties about being a parent are just me nakedly expressing my own anxieties about being a foster parent.
Everything in Brownstone is very messy and sweet and genuine and difficult and it feels a lot like real life. How did you get so much nuance into your plot, especially when working almost entirely with speech bubbles?
Nuance comes from treating the characters like real people. Real people are messy, and cinnamon rolls, and so frustrating that you want to pull out your hair and, also, you can't live without them.
Comics as a medium is the one (outside of film) that I understand intrinsically. I've been reading comics since I was, like, five or six years old, and I never stopped reading them.
I once had a teacher claim that I seemingly learned by osmosis--I think I picked up a lot of comics storytelling through osmosis. I also spent decades writing failed comic after failed comic. All of that is just getting reps in.
What did it feel like when you started seeing some of Mar Julia's art? How much revising happened to make sure text worked with art?
Seeing Mar's art makes my heart soar every single time. It never gets old.
A good deal of revising on my end is cutting dialogue and captions and letting Mar's art sing and tell the story. I always feel like when I'm writing a book that my contributions should merge with the artist's so that it feels like a singular entity made the book.
What are you working on now?
My next graphic novel, Castles and Cholos, is entering art production right now.
And Mar and I are cooking up something that might be of interest to readers of Brownstone. But that's all I can say at the moment.
Is there anything you'd like to tell Shelf Awareness readers?
Honestly and truly, I just want to say thank you for your support and for carrying our book.