Eve Ewing Blasts From Chicago to Space, With a Boost from Marvel

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 almost as quickly 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 plopping down 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 middle-grade 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 caused minor pandemonium on the internet when she announced that she had been hired to write “Ironheart,” the first solo title featuring its character Riri Williams, black girl genius from Chicago.

It’s tempting to see Ewing, who holds a doctorate from Harvard, as a real-life, grown-up version of Riri, a prodigy who builds her own Iron Man suit in her MIT dorm room, without the benefit of Tony Stark’s millions.

But even if she playfully campaigned for the Marvel job with tweets pointing out their commonalities (down to her similar sweep of side-parted dark hair swirled with purple, since cropped closer and dyed blonde on top), 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.”

Not that “fixing everything” isn’t on the agenda. Everything from “Ironheart” (out Nov. 28) to the block party, she likes to say, is really part of one big project: helping to dream, and build, a better version of what she calls her “beautiful, hideous, deeply flawed, lovely, violent, endearing, maligned, beloved hometown.”

Her poetry collection, “Electric Arches,” an Afro-futurist exploration of black girlhood, unfolds against the real and fantastical geography of Chicago, and includes plenty of homespun superpower technology. There are flying bikes, freedom-fighting space invaders, and, “The Device,” a machine created by “a hive mind of black nerds” that allows communication with the ancestors. (Publishers Weekly called it “a stunning debut.”)

In “Ghosts in the Schoolyard,” published by the University of Chicago Press, Ewing uses the more staid tools of social science to dive deep into one of the most contentious episodes in the city’s recent history: the 2013 school closure plan that ultimately resulted in the shuttering of 49 public schools, most of them in African-American neighborhoods.

It’s a scholarly book, and also an unabashedly personal one. It focuses on Bronzeville, the storied African-American neighborhood on the South Side, where Ewing, as she notes in an impassioned introduction, taught middle school for three years after graduating from the University of Chicago.

She looks at the history of discriminatory housing and education policies that gave rise to intensely segregated, unequal, often overcrowded schools, which then suffered steeply declining enrollments after the public housing towers that once dominated the neighborhood were demolished.

She also analyzes the intense community pushback against the closures (including a 34-day hunger strike), zeroing in on a pointed question: “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. The inside of Ewing’s left wrist carries a reminder of her teaching days: a tattoo of an apple, framed by the opening words of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known widely as the black national anthem.

“I loved, loved, loooooved being a teacher,” she said. “Every day I went home knowing exactly what I had done that day to help somebody.”

She was in her second year at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education when the Chicago school closure plan was announced. She recalled the shock of going online and seeing Pershing West Middle School, where she had taught, on the list, and then her anger as school officials justified the plan with a blizzard of metrics, summed up with the blunt label “failing schools.”

“I thought about how clean and beautiful and lovely the inside of our building was, and what it felt like to walk in every day, which was just the opposite of the stereotype being invoked,” she said.

Chicago’s public schools, she noted, are only about 10 percent white. “The city is so segregated, and most people don’t come to the South Side,” she said. “It was basically a way of using the shorthand of ‘these schools, these kids.'”

Ewing grew up in Logan Square, a racially mixed (and now rapidly gentrifying) neighborhood on the northwest side, filling notebooks with writing and drawings on the long bus commute to Northside College Prep, a selective enrollment public high school.

As a teenager, she was active in Young Chicago Authors, a youth arts incubator whose open mic poetry events helped artists like Chance the Rapper, Noname and Jamila Woods get their start. It was there that Ewing, who worked on the organization’s magazine, met some of her current, close-knit circle of friends and collaborators.

Nate Marshall, a poet and fellow Young Chicago Authors alum, with whom Ewing created the poetry block party (sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and held this year in Austin, one of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the city’s gun violence), credited her with “a brain that works a mile a minute.”

“It feels like calisthenics to have a conversation with her, but it doesn’t just stop there,” he said. “She applies the same kind of energy to the things she does in the world.”

Ewing got married in August, and as part of the wedding celebration, she and her husband, an economist, rented a bus and treated their guests to a custom history tour. “We showed them places like the stockyards, and talked about the history of redlining,” she said. After the recent lunch at the Mexican cafe, she jumped in her car, made a U-turn — “one of Chicago’s greatest contributions to culture,” she joked — and offered an abbreviated version focused on Bronzeville.

There was a quick stop in front of the former home of the journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, and then at that of Lu Palmer, a journalist and activist known as “the Panther with the pen.”

She pointed out the site of a Civil War-era camp for Confederate prisoners of war, and the intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway (now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) featured in “Black Metropolis,” the landmark 1945 sociological study by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton.

And more than once, she slowed down to comment in a goofy, affectionate voice about kids in neat uniforms, dawdling on their way home from school. “I just love this time of day,” she said.

Ewing said she had tried to write “Ghosts in the Schoolyard” in a way that would be accessible to ordinary people.

“I like excavating the things right beneath the surface of the city where I live,” she said. “Everybody has a history, every institution has a history, every neighborhood, every rock, tree and car. But society is very selective about which of these histories we choose to talk about.”