Much of Shannon Gibney’s work has been inspired by her children.
After George Floyd’s 2020 murder, which happened near where her family lives and just a couple blocks from her daughter’s school, it became clear she needed to write “We Miss You, George Floyd.” The children’s picture book deals with the aftermath of the murder.
The main character in the book is unnamed, but she’s based on Gibney’s daughter Marwein Corvah, who’s now 10.
In the book — and in real life — she’s a young girl who has questions about the murder, the Black Lives Matter movement and what talk about defunding the police means. Marwein turned to art to help her make sense of the world. So does the character in the book. (Its illustrations are by Leeya Rose Jackson, who drew inspiration from Marwein and her art-filled bedroom.)
“Living in our neighborhood, with the aftermath and the riots and also the white nationalist groups that came in and were wreaking their own havoc, we set up a neighborhood watch and my daughter was part of that — ‘we’ meaning my neighbors and us. It just felt really raw, really visceral, sort of out of control for a little while. And, of course, everything was exacerbated by the pandemic,” said Gibney, a professor at Minneapolis College and the Minnesota Book Award-winning author of “Dream Country” and “The Girl I Am, Was and Never Will Be.”
In the months after Floyd’s murder, the family (including Gibney’s son, Boisey Corvah) often walked from their south Minneapolis home to George Floyd Square, where they saw people singing and dancing, sharing stories and food. But Gibney said it was clear her children needed more.
“People think kids don’t pick up on stuff because they might not have the language for it yet, but they can feel it. My daughter was, like, 6 when that was going on and my son was 10, but I could see it affecting them,” said Gibney, who’s quick to dismiss the idea that children need to be sheltered, for as long as possible, from events like Floyd’s murder.
“There was a woman who had this tweet — I don’t remember who it was — but she had a tweet about the Jan. 6 attack on the capitol and wrote, ‘Don’t we need to shield our kids from this? Why do we need to write about this?’” Gibney recalled. “My response is that that is a white question. Any Black parent knows we have to talk about this stuff with our kids. If we don’t, we’re not protecting them.”