Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Nafissa Thompson-Spires (born 1983 in San Diego, California) is an African American writer known for her debut short story collection Heads of the Colored People (2019), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the PEN Open Book Award, and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction, among other honors including a longlisting for the National Book Award. She holds a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and MFAs from the University of Illinois and Vanderbilt. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times' The 1619 Project, and elsewhere; her debut novel is forthcoming in 2026.