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Ayana Mathis

Biography

Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis' first novel, THE TWELVE TRIBES OF HATTIE, was a New York Times bestseller, an NPR Best Book of 2013, the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. and has been translated into 16 languages. Her nonfiction has been published in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, Guernica and Rolling Stone. Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She was born in Philadelphia and currently lives in New York City where she teaches writing in Hunter College’s MFA Program.

Ayana Mathis

Books by Ayana Mathis

The Unsettled
by Ayana Mathis - Fiction

From the moment Ava Carson and her 10-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. But when Toussaint’s father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhile, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte --- once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination --- in the hands of its last five Black residents and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
by Ayana Mathis - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In 1923, 15-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave.