Shades of Grey

<p><em>Shades of Grey</em> is a graphic memoir by Gabriella Coco Wyatt an incarcerated trans woman serving time at Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary. The book follows Coco's first ten months on the cellblock after arriving at the farm at age twenty-two beginning with her intake onto Death Row: heads shaved numbers assigned bodies reduced to shadows inside concrete cages. From there Coco chronicles the daily terror of life in Angola-field labor under a sadistic guard called Shotgun Slim living with a volatile cellmate known only as Impact and the ever-present threat of sexual and physical violence-alongside the quiet interior world of letters to her mother haunting dreams and a growing awareness of her gender and desire. </p><p></p><p>Drawn in dense expressionistic black and grey Coco's pages move between stark documentary realism and surreal symbolic imagery: nightmares of being strangled in drag philosophical reflections on dreams and the unconscious and moments of tenderness and gallows humor that pierce the brutality of prison life. Through it all she wrestles with guilt for the harm she's caused a longing for love and connection and a stubborn belief that her life-and the lives of those around her-are worth more than the system that cages them. Created over eight years in collaboration with A.B.O. Comix *Shades of Grey* is both a survival story and a love letter to Coco's tribe of queer and trans people inside and out insisting on their full complicated humanity in a place designed to erase it. </p><p></p>