When Samuel Teer and Mar Julia, author and illustrator of Brownstone, received word on Sunday that their graphic novel had won the 2025 Michael L. Printz Award, neither was anticipating the call. In fact, the award committee had some difficulty getting through to Teer at his home in Aurora, Colo., given that his phone blocks calls from all numbers except two: those of his wife and his literary agent, Jas Perry. “I happened to look at my phone and I had three missed calls, a voicemail, and a text message all within the span of 10 minutes,” he said. “When I noticed ‘YALSA’ in the message, I thought that this was a very targeted scam toward me!”
Tipped off by a text from Julia, who had already spoken with the Printz committee, Teer finally returned the mysterious call and tried to absorb the good news as he heard a cacophony of people “hooting and hollering” in the background. “It was very sweet, but very overwhelming to receive so much attention all at once,” he recalled. “I thanked the committee and promised that I would have more words prepared when I go to L.A. to accept the award.”
That same day, Julia, who was in the final throes of moving house in Baltimore, was just pulling up to their new digs when the phone rang. “My partner and I were parked in the middle of the street, with hazard lights flashing, surrounded by vacuums and cleaning supplies, when I got a call from a number I didn’t know,” Mar said. “I’d been so busy moving that I didn’t even know they were announcing the awards that day.”
It was a decidedly welcome surprise. “I approach everything with an air of happiness, and it is always nice to hear that people are connecting to our book,” they said. “It makes me especially happy that the committee liked Brownstone enough to honor it with this award.”
The Book Behind the Prize
Published by Versify, Brownstone is a coming-of-age graphic novel set in 1995 that threads together themes of family, identity, cultural heritage, and finding one’s place in the fabric of a community.
When her white mother heads off on a dance tour, English-speaking Almudena spends the summer with her Guatemalan father, whom she has never met and who speaks only Spanish. As she helps him renovate his old brownstone in a predominantly Latinx urban neighborhood, the teen navigates the language barrier and gets to know the community residents, who have their own joys and heartbreaks—and strong opinions on how she should talk, dress, and behave.
Teer, who previously published a graphic novel, Veda: Assembly Required, with Dark Horse Books, found the inspiration for Brownstone while he was working part-time at a hardware store. “A Latin American father and daughter came into the store,” recalled Teer, whose mother is Guatemalan and father is American. “The daughter was bilingual and she was translating from Spanish into English and English into Spanish. And after I finished the workday, I kept thinking about that young lady and her dad and wondered what their story might be. I think her confidence in standing between two adults and translating for them is what stuck with me. That began to blossom into Almudena’s characteristic of parenting her own parents.”
Also driving Teer’s interest in exploring Almudena’s story was his own teenage experience of visiting his grandfather in Guatemala, “trying to navigate staying in that country and not speaking the language and having everyone translate things around and to me.”
In 2016, Teer reached out to Julia (who has a Dominican father and an American mother of Irish and Italian descent), whose comics he had seen on social media, about the possibility of collaborating on Brownstone. “The primary thing that drew me to Mar was their artwork,” the author noted. “Our shared mixed cultural background came to light in subsequent emails, as did our similar experiences being mixed race.”
Teer and Julia, who makes her graphic novel debut with the book, were on the same wavelength creating Brownstone. “I told Sam from the get-go that I like working collaboratively and feeling a sense of involvement—that is very important to me,” Julia said. “Having the flexibility—and having Sam’s trust—to move illustrations around to make the scenes he wrote work best was really nice.”
That creative give-and-take is at the core of Teer’s bookmaking M.O. “As a writer of graphic novels, collaboration is always my goal,” he said. “You have to be willing to listen and incorporate the ideas of your collaborators. I believe that collaborative spirit is required to build something bigger and better than yourself. I prefer to be as invisible to the project as possible and make the book feel as though this is the work of a single individual. To me, that’s collaboration.”