Venessa V. Kelley

Author/Illustrator
Venessa Vida Kelley has spent a lifetime walking the line between competing labels: Puerto Rican and Sicilian. Latina and white. Washingtonian and New Yorker. Author and illustrator. Lived experiences inspire her daily to explore the shifting border between identities and cultures in her written work, illustrations, and current graphic novel in progress, Manu.
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A lifelong fangirl of comics, animation, and film, Venessa’s transition to graphic novelist was inevitable. Her ongoing education in literature and film has helped her cultivate a cinematic style of writing and drawing that grants accessibility and reach to marginalized stories.

Venessa lives in Washington, DC with her husband and two sons, and can often be found tinkering away on illustrations in her studio. Her works have appeared in Bella Grace Magazine, Discovery Girls Magazine, Bricolage Magazine, and Buzzfeed.
WHEN THE TIDES HELD THE MOON

The Shape of Water meets The Greatest Showman.


Benny Caldera is a young, Black Puerto Rican migrant losing faith in a life beyond the smoke-filled furnaces of the Brooklyn ironworks where he builds the skyscrapers that will one day shape the New York skyline. When he is tasked with building a one-of-a-kind aquatic tank for Morgan's Menagerie of Human Oddities at their upcoming Coney Island installation, he ends up finding himself roped into kidnapping its intended inhabitant: an ocean-eyed merman with copper hair, pewter skin, and a grudge against humanity.


Compelled to care for the creature he helped cage, Benny joins the Menagerie, where its seasoned crew of curiosities adopts him as one of their own. But as his affection for the merman in the tank grows, Benny must reckon with the forces that have held him captive as well and soon realizes there is more than one way to be trapped. Fighting for the merman's freedom may cost him everything.
MANU FACES THE MUSIC
Manuela is at the height of a lucrative music career when a loved one’s death unearths a family secret – that she is the last in a line of powerful mediums capable of channeling vast spiritual energy.

Told she must reawaken her dormant powers to meet a dark threat to the urban community she left behind, Manu is instantly forced out of her high-class solitary lifestyle, pulled by destiny into the center of a rash of mysterious crimes.

​With the help of her brilliant cousin Ivan, the insufferably righteous Delia, and the Spiritual Realm, she must wield her extraordinary abilities in defense of New York City’s most vulnerable or lose everything she holds dear.

Illustrator For Hire