Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Born in 1967, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers received a BA from Talladega College and an MFA from the University of Alabama. She is the author of one novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Harper, 2021), winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and five poetry collections, including The Age of Phillis: Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and recipient of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Poetry; and The Gospel of Barbecue (The Kent State University Press, 2000), selected by Lucille Clifton for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Jeffers has won awards and fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation for Women Writers, the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, and she was a 2021 USA Mellon Fellow. She won the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year, and in 2020, she was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. She is currently a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.