Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an American poet and novelist. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oklahoma. Born in Talladega, Alabama, she grew up in North Carolina and has deep roots in the American South. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Age of Phillis (2020), which won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. Her debut novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (2021) is a monumental achievement—a nearly eight hundred page multigenerational saga tracing an African American family from the antebellum South through the twenty-first century, interweaving the history of slavery, land, and racial violence in Georgia with the contemporary story of a young Black woman's coming of age. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction in 2022. It is widely considered one of the great American novels of the twenty-first century. Jeffers received fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and other organizations. She is also known for her essays on race, gender, and the politics of the literary world.