Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Final Revival of Opal & Nev | 2021 | Buy |
Dawnie Walton is a novelist and former editor at Essence and Entertainment Weekly. She was born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, and now lives in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she has also taught fiction.
Her debut novel, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev (2021), is a fictional oral history of a beloved 1970s rock duo – Opal Jewel, a Black woman from Detroit, and Neville “Nev” Charles, a white Englishman – who shot to fame in New York. Structured as interviews collected by a music journalist decades later, the novel explores race, art, privilege, and memory through the lens of a rock ’n’ roll partnership. It won the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.