Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

Honoree Fanonne Jeffers works across poetry, fiction, essays, and history, linking family memory with the longer record of the United States. Her first novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, follows Ailey Pearl Garfield through a multigenerational Georgia family history and uses W. E. B. Du Bois's ideas as an intellectual frame. Harper issued it in 2021. The novel became an Oprah's Book Club selection, appeared on Barack Obama's reading list, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction, and the Spalding Prize. Jeffers had already published five poetry collections, including The Age of Phillis, built from extensive archival work on Phillis Wheatley Peters and honored with the NAACP Image Award for poetry. That background helps explain the novel's scale: individual coming-of-age, ancestral research, place, and cultural history develop together across generations.