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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Biography

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections, including the 2020 collection THE AGE OF PHILLIS, which won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry and was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She was a contributor to THE FIRE THIS TIME: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward, and has been published in the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review and other literary publications. Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, whose members include 14 U.S. presidents, and is Critic at Large for Kenyon Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at University of Oklahoma.

THE LOVE SONGS OF W. E. B. DU BOIS is her first novel and was a New York Times bestseller, longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and an Oprah Book Club Pick.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Books by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers - Essays, Nonfiction

Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. Black women in America are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression. In MISBEHAVING AT THE CROSSROADS, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers - Fiction

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’ words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans --- the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great-grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers --- Ailey carries Du Bois’ Problem on her shoulders. To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors --- Indigenous, Black and white --- in the deep South.