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WORK TITLE: Sky Full of Elephants
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WEBSITE: https://cebocampbell.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
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COUNTRY: United States
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PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Creative director and writer. Spherical, cofounder and creative director.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
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Cebo Campbell is a creative director who cofounded his own brand management agency. He is also an author, and his debut novel, Sky Full of Elephants, was published in 2024.
Sky Full of Elephants is a high-concept novel, where the narrative is based on a spectacular event or idea, a what-if, that sets the stage for everything that happens. In Campbell’s story, that what-if is, what would the world be like if every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned? For the novel’s Black protagonist, Charlie Bunton, he has gone from serving time in prison for a wrongful conviction to now being a professor at Howard University, but then he gets a call from a nineteen-year-old daughter that he was not sure existed. She has been left behind by her white mother and step-family and needs his help. She and and her father soon set out on a journey across America, discovering what it means to be Black when there are no white people around.
Writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Leah Tyler called the book a “provocative speculative-fiction debut” and praised the setup as a “compelling springboard” to explore what a post-racial society might be like. Tyler was particularly impressed with the “spectacular plot twist” that raises new questions. A writer in Publishers Weekly described the book as a “stunning allegory” that will “definitely get people talking.” They compared the novel to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Emily Whitmore, writing in Booklist, praised the novel as a “powerful and riveting story” that will lead to “some very interesting book-discussion conversations.” Whitmore acknowledged, however, that the novel may be “uncomfortable” for some readers.
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 24, 2024, Leah Tyler, “A World without White People: New Novel Paints Provocative Portrait of a New World Disorder,” review of Sky Full of Elephants, p. E3.
Booklist, August, 2024, Emily Whitmore, review of Sky Full of Elephants, p. 49.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2024, review of Sky Full of Elephants.
Publishers Weekly, July 29, 2024, review of Sky Full of Elephants, p. 32.
ONLINE
Cebo Campbell website, https://cebocampbell.com/ (December 18, 2024).
I am an author and a Creative Director. My latest books are:
Sky Full of Elephants – coming 2024
Violet in Some Places – Available at Not A Cult
As a full-time creative (Chief Creative Officer at Spherical), I spend most days at the desk leading a team of creatives to brand some of the best hotels in the world. So, I write in the nooks and crannies of my available time. I wake up at 5:30am just to get in a few hours putting words on paper. I write on the train. I write on planes. I write waiting in lines. I feel I have to write. The reason is simple: representation.
Cebo Campbell Author of Violet in Some Places
I often tell the story of Ferris Bueller; a kid who decides to skip school and, on charm alone, steals a car, impersonates a cop, drinks underage, tampers with computers, and at every step exposes his best friends to peril, only to go home and fall asleep with his mother to kiss him into sweet dreams. I asked myself if Ferris were Trayvon Martin, how might that story end? I know the answer. So do you. And this is why representation is so important. I aim to contribute more stories into the world that diversely feature regular (but beautiful) lives made extraordinary. Art, I believe, is the only way to accomplish this. All my creative work is inspired by and aims to add to all the great work in the world.
Author Cebo Campbell was hoping to answer a specific question when he sat down with an idea for a story: What would happen if he took Ferris Bueller and replaced him with Trayvon Martin?
Campbell reveals in a conversation with author Jason Reynolds that within 10 pages, his story fell apart. He couldnt authentically create a world where Martin, a 17-year-old Floridian who was killed by civilian George Zimmerman in 2012, would survive after performing the antics actor Matthew Broderick gets away with in the 1986 classic movie, Ferris Buellers Day Off.
Being a Black man in the United States, you move through the world with what feels like something around you at all times, Campbell told Reynolds during their interview at Politics and Prose Bookstore last month.
Before he could write comedy, Campbell was compelled to create a world free of the constraints he lives with every day. The result is his provocative speculative-fiction debut Sky Full of Elephants, a novel that opens a year after every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned.
This shocking incident of ethnic cleansing is called the event and brings about mass change as people of color adapt to a new way of life. Individual reactions are mixed. Some survivors are angry or convinced they have been left behind. Others experience the event as an improvement and feel avenged or freed. Still others long for the world as it was before. Regardless, all experience a vacuum left by these deaths.
Although other nonwhite ethnicities also survive, Campbell focuses on the Black experience through his protagonist, Charlie Brunton. Charlie is a cautious and methodical character who is burdened with the conflict of his own darkness. He struggles to stop seeing himself through the eyes of the world and how it reacted to him after spending two decades wrongfully incarcerated. Campbells prose is philosophical and lyrical as he journeys through Charlies mind while he adapts to his newfound freedom.
A professor at Howard University, Charlie receives a call one day from his biracial daughter whom he never has met asking for his help. Her request sends him on a road trip from Washington, D.C., to her location in Wisconsin as he navigates a post-apocalyptic terrain of abandoned suburbs and defunct electric-vehicle charging stations.
Campbell builds a vivid world as he reveals which systems and institutions stay, which go away, and what crops up in their place. Although its impossible to address every facet, he covers a lot of terrain as he conceives of a world without whiteness and what is important to those who survive.
Gas stations, chain grocery stores and online shopping have gone belly-up as a result of us having too little to say in the running of the before world. The internet is spotty, and TV still broadcasts something resembling the news. Historically Black universities flourish, with towns like D.C. and Chicago thriving as a result. Meanwhile, Harvard and Yale are haunted with vacancy. Police stations are boarded up, country clubs burned down and the White House sits desecrated with human excrement.
The airport is still functioning but under a completely different set of operating guidelines than before. Fuel is scarce because nobody has resumed drilling for oil or trading internationally. Housing is plentiful and homelessness has been eradicated, but things like packaged cakes and chips are running scarce after the collapse of manufacturing.
Divisive factions emerge, such as those who formerly passed for white bonding over the memories of their own supremacy. But overwhelmingly, Campbell makes his point that the survivors have rejected white elitism for a different idea of both power and a good life. But many are exhausted from spending their lives in an unequal system. After a year spent scrambling to survive, they have yet to define what a progressive future looks like.
Charlies 19-year-old daughter, Sidney, is traumatized after watching her white family members walk into the lake behind their house. She spends a year in solitude before her uncles wife makes contact. Determined to reunite with her in Alabama, Sidney calls Charlie for help. He is the only person she knows who didnt die, and she cant reunite with her Aunt Agnes without him.
Campbells setup provides a compelling springboard for the estranged father and daughter to explore different aspects of this new society on their Mad Max journey through Southern states. As their adventure takes wild turns, Charlies charge is to overcome his lifelong battle with externalized subjugation caused by his wrongful conviction. Conversely, Sidneys struggle is internal as she embarks on a mission to reclaim the advantage she experienced while passing as white.
Sidney believes she will encounter like-minded individuals once they reach Alabama, now a kingdom considered too dangerous to visit. Nobody is sure what has happened in the South, other than its a place people dont return from. Nevertheless, Sidney is determined to find her aunt. And Charlie is committed to supporting his daughter.
As the unlikely duo venture deeper into the unknown, Cebo Campbell gets a step closer to creating a world where Trayvon Martin could have behaved like Ferris Bueller and prevailed. His protagonists discover a movement is taking hold. Survivors are discovering not only hope but joy.
As Charlie and Sidney barrel toward their own resolutions, Sky Full of Elephants provides a spectacular plot twist that asks an uncomfortable question worthy of an honest answer: How can a country that never has made space for a racial reckoning heal from generations of oppression?
FICTION
Sky Full of Elephants
by Cebo Campbell, Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $27.99
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Cox Enterprises d/b/a The Atlanta Journal Constitution
http://www.ajc.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Tyler, Leah. "A world without white people: New novel paints provocative portrait of a new world disorder." Atlanta Journal-Constitution [Atlanta, GA], 24 Nov. 2024, p. E3. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817451926/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b676a9e6. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.
Sky Full of Elephants
Cebo Campbell. Simon & Schuster, $27.99 (304p) ISBN 978-1-6680-3492-7
Campbell (Violet in Some Places) delivers a captivating near-future fantasy set one year after every white person in the U.S. walked in droves to the nearest body of water and drowned themselves. In the wake of "the event," people of color emancipated themselves from debt, jobs, prison, and other forms of bondage and reshaped the country. Charlie Brunton, who left prison (the details and merits of the case against him come out later) and has a new life with a nice house in a Washington, D.C., suburb, observes, "In the absence of white people, the American identity moved forward, but with a handicap, limping under the weight of old ways and a crippled sense of self." The plot gets underway when Charlie receives a call from his estranged 19-year-old daughter, Sidney, whose white mother drowned and who has been hiding in Wisconsin since the event. She convinces Charlie to accompany her to Alabama, where she believes some of her white relatives may be hiding out. Campbell's depiction of their trek across an altered and occasionally nightmarish Southern landscape evokes Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and he caps the narrative with fascinating revelations about the cause of the event. It's a stunning allegory, and one that'll definitely get people talking. Agent: Byrd Leavell, UTA. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Sky Full of Elephants." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 29, 29 July 2024, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A803782749/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d3286197. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.
Sky Full of Elephants.
By Cebo Campbell.
Sept. 2024. 304p. Simon & Schuster, $27.99
(9781668034927); e-book (9781668034941).
Charles Brunton and his daughter, Sidney, live in a world rebuilding itself after a mass-death event. One day, for no obvious reason, all of the white people walked into the nearest body of water. For Sidney, this meant watching her white mother and stepfamily disappear into a large lake in Wisconsin. For Charles, who is Black, it meant he was released from prison for a crime he didn't commit. Sidney, who has never met Charles, calls him for help getting to Alabama, where there is a rumored colony of white people who survived. The journey Sidney and Chars undertake is not easy; at one point, they end up at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and Charles worries about where he will be able to charge his electric car. The thought experiment of the novel is fascinating, and the jump into a space without the many racist systems in place--and the people who benefit from them--is illuminating. This will be an uncomfortable novel for some, but it's a truly powerful and riveting story that could make for some very interesting book-discussion conversations.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Whitmore, Emily. "Sky Full of Elephants." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 22, Aug. 2024, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808396764/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1e024f9d. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.
Campbell, Cebo SKY FULL OF ELEPHANTS Simon & Schuster (Fiction None) $27.99 9, 10 ISBN: 9781668034927
A professor and his daughter navigate a new America where all white people have died by suicide.
"They killed themselves," explains Charlie Brunton, the narrator of Campbell's high-concept novel. "One morning, every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned." Charlie is a Black man who's served time in prison, wrongfully convicted of rape; after the mass suicide of white people, he became a professor at Howard University, trying to make sense of a country with no real government or systems: "Only a fragile structure remained ." Charlie gets a phone call from his daughter, Sidney, born to the white woman he was accused of raping, asking him to drive her from her home in Wisconsin to Alabama, where she's heard that some surviving white people are living. Sidney has internalized racism, opining that "the world got left to the heathens" and lamenting her physical similarities to her Black father. Charlie and Sidney enlist the help of a pilot to get them to the South, eventually ending up in Mobile, where they encounter a new society that neither of them expected and learn what was behind the mass suicide of white Americans. Campbell's novel starts off fairly strong--it's undoubtedly an interesting thought experiment--but goes off the rails quickly, sunk by the author's often too-florid prose and unrealistic dialogue. Sidney's transition from self-hating to enlightened is forced, and aside from the two protagonists, the characters are purely functional. This book reads less like a novel and more like an extended treatment for a television series.
A plodding novel from a talented writer.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Campbell, Cebo: SKY FULL OF ELEPHANTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804504745/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eb25a306. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.