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Nyani Nkrumah

Biography

Nyani Nkrumah

Nyani Nkrumah was born in Boston and raised in Ghana and Zimbabwe. She developed her love of reading and writing from her mother, who taught English Literature and Language and encouraged her children to recite poems and Shakespeare soliloquies. After graduating from Amherst College with a dual major in Biology and Black Studies, Nkrumah received her master’s at the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from Cornell University. She has lived in the Washington, DC, region for the past 20 years.

Nyani Nkrumah

Books by Nyani Nkrumah

Wade in the Water
by Nyani Nkrumah - Fiction

Set in 1982, in rural, racially divided Ricksville, Mississippi, WADE IN THE WATER tells the story of Ella, a Black, unloved, precocious 11-year-old, and Ms. St. James, a mysterious white woman from Princeton who appears in Ella’s community to carry out some research. Soon, Ms. St. James befriends Ella, who is willing to risk everything to keep her new friend in a town that does not want her there. The relationship between Ella and Ms. St. James, at times loving and funny and other times tense and cautious, becomes more fraught and complex as Ella unwittingly pushes at Ms. St. James’ carefully constructed boundaries that guard a complicated past, and dangerous secrets that could have devastating consequences.