March

Congressman John Lewis tells his own story of the civil rights movement in the first volume of a black-and-white graphic novel trilogy, written with Andrew Aydin and drawn by Nate Powell. Book One covers Lewis's youth in rural Alabama, the founding of the Nashville Student Movement, his meeting with Martin Luther King Jr., and the nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins the students waged against segregation. The project grew from a 10-cent comic, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, which showed the teenage Lewis the discipline of nonviolence; Lewis later told Aydin, his technology policy aide, about its influence. Top Shelf Productions published it in 2013, and no graphic novel had won a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award before it.

Tim Cook was reported to have said, while introducing Lewis at Apple headquarters, that he hoped everyone would read it and would like to see it required in every school.