Roseanne A. Brown

Born in Kumasi in 1995 and brought to the United States at three, Roseanne A. Brown grew up on the Anansi tales her Ghanaian parents told her, and went back to West African folklore when she came to write fiction of her own. A Song of Wraiths and Ruin, published by HarperCollins in 2020, sets a refugee boy and a crown princess against each other across a week-long festival in a desert city, each needing the other dead for reasons the other cannot guess. It reached the New York Times list and was a Kirkus best book of the year, and the sequel, A Psalm of Storms and Silence, closed the pair in 2021. Brown studied journalism at Maryland, where she also taught in the Jiménez-Porter Writers' House programme, and has reported for outlets including Voice of America. She later wrote the Black Panther graphic novel Shuri and T'Challa: Into the Heartlands, drawn by Dika Araújo, Natacha Bustos and Claudia Aguirre.