Honoree Fanonne Jeffers grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. She is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Oklahoma. Before her novel, she published five books of poetry, including The Age of Phillis (2020), which won the NAACP Image Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. That collection was based on fifteen years of research into the life of Phillis Wheatley, the first African American woman to publish a book.
Her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (2021), became a New York Times bestseller and was selected for Oprah’s Book Club. The novel traces several generations of an African American family in Georgia, from the era of slavery through the civil rights movement and into the 21st century. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.