Danzy Senna

Danzy Senna is an American novelist of mixed Black and white heritage. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1970, she studied at Stanford University and received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Her debut novel Caucasia (1998) is a coming-of-age story about biracial sisters who are separated when their activist parents' interracial marriage falls apart. The novel became a modern classic of mixed-race identity fiction. Senna's subsequent novels include Symptomatic (2004) and New People (2017). Her most recent novel Colored Television (2024) is a darkly comic satire about a mixed-race author in Los Angeles who has spent decades writing a novel about mixed-race history and who is desperately trying to sell a television show. The novel won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2025 and the PEN/Faulkner Award finalist recognition. It was praised for its biting wit, its acute skewering of Hollywood race politics, and its exploration of what it means to be a Black writer in America today. Senna teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.