Cebo Campbell Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Poetry Books

Cebo Campbell
Cebo Campbell is an author and creative director based in Brooklyn. His range of talents as a creative director have sent him all around the globe infusing creativity, from working with The Shakespearan Birthplace Trust in the UK, to writing and directing “Refuge: Triumph in Tulsa”, a VR short film, based on the famed Black Wall Street in Oklahoma, to concepting the Million Miracles humanitarian campaign throughout India and Africa.

His expansive work as a designer, writer, and director are all powered by this singular mindset: contribute meaningfully to the culture. And he does. With everything that he touches.

Cebo won the Linda L. Ross Creative Writing Award and the Stories Award for Poetry, his work has been featured in numerous publications.

He’s the co-founder of Spherical, the award winning creative agency, where he leads a team of creatives in shaping the best hotel brands in the whole world.

Cebo is likely somewhere in Europe enjoying good whiskey and even better conversation.

“Sky Full of Elephants” was inspired by so many things. However he’s attempted to consolidate it into a single thing and that is “Paradise” by Toni Morrison. The opening line made him wonder what the book even was. It was such an astonishing thing, and it was such a gripping thing to hook him in. while he was writing the book, he’d have these waking images in his mind of Toni telling him not to hold back and to write the book.

He didn’t want to write the novel like this. He actually wanted to write a comedy or love story, something like that. When he attempted to imagine the characters he had in his mind, they were funnier and freer; moving with a degree of audacity, not unlike what you’d see in a John Hughes movie. When he tried writing these sorts of characters, and used the rules of the world as he understood it, they just didn’t work. So he wondered how could he fix that within himself. Then the novel became an exercise in processing traumas.

There was a moment when he wondered if there were no black people, but realized that happens all the time, so he tried something else. He’s been attempting to comprehend the difference between culture as we understand it, and stereotypes. How can he define what Blackness is, if he cannot determine the difference between the two? While he was analyzing all this and thinking about it further, he thought if he took a character in anything, and were to replace it with the perspective of a person of color, there are automatically things that are presupposed which would be different.

“Conversations With Women” is the first poetry collection and was released in 2019. Cebo delivers a collection of real conversations with real women pieced into this coming of age narrative. Part memoir, part poetry, a boy becomes a man exploring themes of sex, youth, identity, and patriarchy through the wisdom of women. Timeless words in some important times.

“Violet in Some Places” is the second poetry collection and was released in 2021. This is the story of the life of a man that’s enveloped in the nurturing and raw magic of matriarchs. If there ever was a guide toward masculine vulnerability, power through listening, a rosetta stone for empathy, it’s here in the poetic and silky prose that’s beautifully woven throughout all of this empowering collection from Cebo.

“Sky Full of Elephants” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2024. In an imaginative and bold story that’s set in a world where white people no longer exist, Charlie Brunton (a college professor) gets a call from his estranged daughter Sidney which sets off a series of events while they journey across a truly “post-racial” America to find answers.

In a world without white people, what does it even mean to be Black?

This one day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all the white people in America walk right into the nearest body of water. One year later, Charlie is a Black man that is living in a totally new world. Having served his time for a wrongful conviction, he is now a professor at Harvard University of solar and electric power systems when he gets this call from somebody he was not even sure existed: Sidney, his daughter, a 19 year old left behind by her white mom and step-family.

Traumatized by the event, and horrified by the outside world, she’s spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to a dad she never met before, a man that she’s always resented. Charlie and Sidney meet for the very first time while embarking on a journey across a truly “post-racial” America looking for answers. However neither one of them are ready for this new world and how they view themselves in it.

Heading south toward what’s now being called the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Sidney and Charlie believed they knew about themselves, and the world as a whole, is going to be turned upside down. Brimming with humor and heart, it’s a stunning allegory is going to spark so much discussion about the power of community and connection, about self-actualization and healing, and a reckoning with what it truly means to be Black in America, in both our world and theirs.

Full of sprawling mansions up for grabs, airline less airports, and an Alabaman monarchy, this is a supremely imaginative exploration of loss, family, and the many roads to healing. Cebo gifts us this vivid odyssey filled with possibility, proving that liberation does not reside in the rejection of history, however in our embrace of it. Here is a debut novel which dares us to tap into frequencies of freedom, to view ourselves as what we really are and always have been: beings filled with light worthy of love.

An imaginative and bold premise that unfolds with lyrical language, humor, and hope. Like the best speculative fiction, it compels us to view our own world through some new eyes. It’s a debut that should not be missed.