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.

Books by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

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.