These posts about Graphic Dead Man Walking have, to date, been a catch-up journal, reaching back to when the book was a spark in Sister Helen Prejean’s eye.
It might help, as you read them, to have a timeline of the book:
- February, 2019: The idea for a graphic version of Dead Man Walking is born.
- April, 2019: Discovery of our extraordinary illustrator, Catherine Anyango Grünewald.
- August, 2019: We submit our book proposal to Random House, with Julia Masnik of Watkins/Loomis beautifully shepherding our contract through the negotiations. Gloria Loomis, the founder of Watkins/Loomis, was Sister Helen’s literary agent for Dead Man Walking and the two have been working together ever since. As part of the negotiations, we submit rough drafts of several pages of the book, so writing and illustrating are already well underway.
- October, 2019: The contract is signed.
- December, 2019: We receive our first advance checks. Champagne is opened!
- June, 2020: The original deadline for the first half of the manuscript. Alas, the pandemic puts paid to that optimistic timeline.
- August, 2020: We submit the prologue and first three chapters for review by our editor, Andrea Walker. Andrea, who is vice president and executive editor at Random House, also edited Sr. Helen’s most recent book, River of Fire. She gives us a more-than-enthusiastic go-ahead.
- December, 2021: Our goal for submitting the final manuscript. Hah! That date, too, comes and goes as parenting, work, and life in general take their toll on an optimistic schedule.
- December, 2023: Our revised goal for completing the manuscript. We manage to submit all but the last, short chapter and the three-spread epilogue by this date. That’s almost 300 illustrated pages complete. Andrea Walker congratulates us on what she calls “a magnificent accomplishment”. Catherine shares with me that Jason Lute’s graphic book, Berlin, took 20 years to complete, and so we pat ourselves on the back for our ultra-rapid, five-year timeline.
- Summer, 2024: The absolute final deadline for the completed, edited manuscript if we hope to publish by…
- Summer, 2025.
What’s happening now
There are long lead times in the publishing industry, so while our book takes its final shape in the publisher’s hands, all three of us will be beavering away on a variety of tasks.
Catherine is continuing her teaching at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. She’ll also have a chance to work on some of her other, much-delayed projects.
Sister Helen will, as ever, be giving talks across the country about the death penalty; working to save the lives of people on death rows around the USA; and writing her next book, which centers around the story of Manuel Ortiz, who she has been visiting on death row at Angola for the past 25 years.
I’ll be working alongside Sr. Helen, visiting Manuel and others in Angola; working on death penalty campaigns; writing this account of the Graphic Dead Man Walking; and building this website to provide background, additional material, references, and teaching materials to accompany the book when it’s launched.
Postscript from 2025
Deadlines in writing and publishing prove to be extraordinarily flexible things. So, here we are in early 2025, still beavering away on the finishing touches of the book. Current plan is to have it on bookshelves by November, 2025. That looks entirely doable!