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. She is also the author of 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 additional awards and fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation for Women Writers, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. She was also a 2021 USA Mellon Fellow. Jeffers 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. In 2023, she received the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature.

Jeffers is currently a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, where she holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English. In February 2024, she served as the Guest Editor of Poem-a-Day.