Eve Ewing

Eve Louise Ewing (born 1986) is an American sociologist, author, poet, and visual artist from Chicago, Illinois.

Ewing is a tenured professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.

She earned a Master of Arts in Teaching in Elementary Education from Dominican University and taught middle school Language Arts in Chicago Public Schools before attending Harvard where she earned a Masters of Education in Education Policy and Management (2013), then a doctorate from Harvard University's Graduate School of Education (2016).

At Harvard, Ewing served as editor and co-chair of the Harvard Educational Review.

Writing for The Huffington Post, Zeba Blay named Ewing's essay on Joshua Beal's death to a list of "30 Of The Most Important Articles By People Of Color In 2016."

For NPR, Gene Demby praised Ewing's "moving essay...about the fight over the future of Dyett High in Chicago."

She is the former editor at Seven Scribes and the author of the poetry collection Electric Arches which was released in September 2017.

Her Twitter account, operated as "Wikipedia Brown", drew 30 million views a month as of September 2017.

Ewing's academic research focuses on school closures.

She earned a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, writing a dissertation on school closures in Chicago entitled "Shuttered Schools in the Black Metropolis: Race, History, and Discourse on Chicago's South Side."

In Chicago Magazine in 2017, Adam Morgan described her as one of the city's "most visible cultural icons."

Her academic research in the sociology of education includes her 2018 book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, a study of school closures in Chicago.

Ewing was a Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago, then became an assistant professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago in 2018.

As of 2023, she is an Associate Professor Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in the University of Chicago's Division of the Social Sciences.

She also is on the UChicago Committee on Education.

Ewing is active in the Chicago community.

She co-created and runs the Emerging Poets Incubator and Chicago Poetry Block Party.

She also teaches with the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, a visual arts and humanities project that connects teaching artists and scholars to men at Stateville Maximum Security Prison.

She is also on the Board of Directors of Massachusetts-based nonprofit MassLEAP, which builds and supports spaces for youth, artist-educators, and organizers to foster positive youth development through spoken-word poetry forums throughout Massachusetts.

Ewing is also one of the most popular sociologists on Twitter.

Her book on school closures, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, was released in October 2018 by the University of Chicago Press.

Ghosts in the Schoolyard examines the demise of public schools in Chicago's Bronzeville district after the demolition of public housing, and analyzes community efforts to keep the schools open, including a community-wide hunger strike.

In her book, Ewing introduces a concept called "institutional mourning", which refers to the multiple negative impacts experienced by the residents of areas where schools have been closed.

According to The Chicago Reader, "she finds that school closures are a form of publicly sanctioned violence that not only derails black children's futures but also erases a community's past."

Ewing's work became especially poignant during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ewing studied the impact of neighborhood, race, and socio-economics on student access to counselors and therapists, as well as their experiences with illnesses and deaths.

Ewing's writing includes poetry, prose and journalism, in addition to her academic scholarship.

She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the Pamet River Prize for a first or second full-length book of poetry or prose by a female-identified or genderqueer author.

ProPublica named her Seven Scribes article on the fight to save Chicago State University to its list of "The Best MuckReads on America's Troubled History With Race".

In 2019, she published 1919, a poetry collection centered around the Chicago race riot of 1919.

Additionally, Ewing is the author of the Ironheart comic book series for Marvel centered on the young heroine Riri Williams.

Ewing grew up in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago.

Her mother worked as a radio reporter and producer and her father an artist.

Ewing attended Northside College Preparatory High School.

She was a part of Young Chicago Authors.

Ewing attended the University of Chicago for college, where she received an undergraduate degree with honors in English Language & Literature from the University of Chicago, with a focus on African-American literature of the twentieth century.

Ewing is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

Ewing has also drawn notice for her commentary on subjects like colorism, school choice, structural racism, federal arts funding, Frank Ocean and Harper Lee, race in publishing and in visual culture.

Much of Ewing's poetry covers similar topics as her scholarly work, such as the Black experience.

For example, she discusses Black feminism through the Exodus in Electric Arches.