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| Honorée Fanonne Jeffers |
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. DuBOIS & The And I Thought Ladies
We talk with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, award-winning poet and now novelist, about The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, just out from Harper Collins.
Then, two young women build a literary empire around poetry and life lessons. We talk with Jade Dee and Wilnona Marie, the And I Thought Ladies.
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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ debut novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois is already racking up the kudos—and it’s only been out since August 24.
Oprah picked it for her Book Club, the New York Times reviewer called it “quite simply the best book that I have read in a very, very long time,” and it’s up for numerous awards.
So what’s it all about? The great writer Jacqueline Woodson—a former Writer’s Voice guest—describes it:
“This sweeping, brilliant and beautiful narrative is at once a love song to Black girlhood, family, history, joy, pain… and so much more. In Jeffers’ deft hands, the story of race and love in America becomes the great American novel.”
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is about a family through the centuries and also about one young descendant living in the contemporary world, discovering her family’s story.
The author of five acclaimed books of poetry, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers brings her poetic lyricism to her prose in this, her debut novel. Jeffers is Professor of English at University of Oklahoma in Norman.
Jade Dee and Wilnona Marie, The And I Thought Ladies
Francesca met Jade Dee and Wilnona Marie, The And I Thought Ladies, when they invited her onto their podcast.
She Googled their work and found it includes a series of poetry books self-described as “literary life guides with w/ pop poetry,” called the And I Thought series, a “Miss-Fit Guide”, at least one podcast, at least two magazines, a store, a literary festival and more.
They are a dynamic duo, but, more than that, they are two very thoughtful and energetic women who seek to make a difference in people’s lives with poetry.
The And I Thought Ladies on Facebook
Next week on Writer’s Voice,we talk with Julia Sweig about her acclaimed book about the White House years of Lady Bird Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight. Don’t miss it!
WRITER'S VOICE |
| Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Photo by Sidney A Foster |
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers was born in 1967 and grew up in Durham, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia. Her work examines culture, religion, race, and family. Her first book, The Gospel of Barbecue (2000), was selected by Lucille Clifton for the Stan and Tom Wick poetry prize and was a 2001 Paterson Poetry prize finalist. Her subsequent collections include The Age of Phillis (2020); The Glory Gets (2015); Red Clay Suite (2007), which received second prize in the Crab Orchard Review’s open competition; and Outlandish Blues (2003).
Jeffers’s work has been anthologized in numerous volumes, including Roll Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (2002) and These Hands I Know: Writing About the African American Family (2002). Jeffers is also the author of the novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (2021), and she has published fiction in the Indiana Review, the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, and Story Quarterly. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2011, and in 2018, she won the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year. The recipient of honors from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, Jeffers teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma where she is an associate professor of English.
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