Marvel Comics announced Monday that Dr. Eve Ewing, a writer and scholar from Chicago, will pen the forthcoming comic series Ironheart. The comic will follow teen genius Riri Williams, a native of Chicago and an MIT student, who builds her own version of Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit. “I’m really proud to be doing this and really proud and happy for Riri,” tweeted Ewing.

Before Ironheart, Ewing garnered acclaim as the author of the poetry collection Electric Arches (Haymarket Books) and the sociological text Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (University of Chicago Press). Ewing has earned awards from the American Library Association and the Poetry Society of America. Electric Arches was named one of the year’s best books by NPR and the Chicago Tribune.

In addition to her presence in contemporary literature and academia, Ewing also commands an impressive Twitter audience of over 167,000 followers. Earlier this year, an online petition circulated among Ewing’s fans, pleading Marvel to hire the poet and longtime comic book follower as the writer of Riri Williams’s story. “Ewing is uniquely prepared to take on this challenge; she’s a disciple in the craft of graphic narrative, following in the footsteps of adroit storytellers like Scott McCloud, Lynda Barry, and Will Eisner,” the petition’s description reads. To date, the petition has garnered over 2,500 signatures.

When asked by Marvel.com to describe the character of Riri, Ewing said, “She’s still kind of figuring out the whole ‘peer relationships’ thing. She’s a deeply caring person with a good—she just needs to work through some of the awkwardness… because she went to high school and then onto MIT when she was really young, her sense of some of the rites of passage that most of us go through is a little off.”

Ewing also spoke to the ways she envisions her own background, geography, and history appearing in the story of Riri. “One thing I’ve had to wrestle with is that if you’re a black woman at a place like MIT, where Riri goes to school, or down the street at Harvard, where I went to graduate school, the social environment was kind of constructed without you in mind, and these institutions ask you to make a lot of compromises that you have to navigate,” she said. “That’s definitely something Riri will be dealing with. More broadly, she and I have a lot in common, and it’s been so fun to write her so far. Not just as a black woman, but specifically as a black woman from Chicago, and an awkward nerd, and someone who’s spent a lot of time in Cambridge. In everything I write, I always try to illuminate a strong sense of place. It’s been really fun to bring out little details of those places. Shouting out Chicago in particular is pretty much my favorite thing.”

Ironheart will be illustrated by Kevin Libranda and will be released on November 7.

Photo Credit: Nolis Anderson