YIELD: Nicola Streeten's experimental graphic novel on queer history
Reading time: 1 minute
YIELD asks what a graphic novel can reveal when the archive cannot. Nicola Streeten's new book explores queer history, creative freedom and repression through the life of her great-uncle, John Evarts.
Evarts was a founding teaching member of Black Mountain College. The college was a radical North Carolina experiment in art and alternative education. His contribution and his sexuality have largely remained at the margins of its official histories.
YIELD moves between the 1930s, the 1970s and the present. Streeten combines archival research, family memory and fiction to reconstruct a life that survives only partially in the record.
Streeten uses the freedoms of graphic narrative to explore those gaps. Pencil and watercolour drawings sit alongside collage, photography, digital imagery and archival material. The form deliberately resists a conventional visual language, echoing Black Mountain's own emphasis on experimentation, collaboration and process.
At the heart of YIELD is a contradiction. How can an artistic community committed to freedom exist within a society that represses some of its own members?
The result is neither conventional biography nor historical reconstruction. Where the archive is silent, Streeten uses fiction to imagine possibilities while acknowledging the limits of what can be known.
Nicola Streeten is a graphic novelist, illustrator and comics scholar. Her previous books include Billy, Me & You, The Inking Woman and UK Feminist Cartoons and Comics: A Critical Survey. She co-founded LDComics and has worked internationally as an artist and facilitator.
YIELD is published on 9 November 2026 in the UK.
YIELD Publication details
- Publisher: Plowman Press
- Publication date: 9 November 2026
- Format:Graphic novel | Full colour hardback | 228 pages
- ISBN: 9791066882113
- Price: £25
- Availability: https://payhip.com/b/ljrZG
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