Lion Forge will publish Hazel Newlevant’s 200 page debut graphic memoir, No Ivy League in late 2018.

Hoping to make money to see an out-of-town concert, 17-year-old Hazel Newlevant takes a summer job clearing ivy from the forest in her home town of Portland, Oregon. Homeschooled, affluent, and sheltered, Hazel finds her job working side by side with at-risk teens a new world that she has no skill in navigating. She loves hip hop, but spending time with kids who are black and Latino is a new experience for her. As the weeks pass, Hazel’s once-comfortable homeschooled skin has become more ill fitting. Things come to a head when she finds herself the butt of a black peer’s sexual insult and, instead of trying to work it out, she reports him. The consequences of her actions play out not only for the boy but for Hazel herself, as she’s forced to confront the reality of white privilege. This uncomfortable and compelling memoir is an important story of a girl’s awakening to the racial insularity of her life, the power of white privilege, and the hidden story of segregation in Portland.

Hazel Newlevant is the creator of the graphic novellas If This Be Sin and Sugar Town, and publisher of the anthologies Comics for Choice and Chainmail Bikini: The Anthology of Women Gamers. Her work as a cartoonist has been honored with the Ignatz Award, Xeric Grant, and Prism Comics Queer Press Grant. Hazel also works as an associate editor at Lion Forge. Hazel is represented by Tanya McKinnon of McKinnon McIntyre.