Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

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About Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Her first novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, is forthcoming from Harper in July 2021; in addition, she’s the author of five books of poetry, most recently, The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan, 2020), based upon fifteen years of research on the life and times of Phillis Wheatley (Peters), a formerly enslaved person who was the first African American woman to publish a book. Jeffers’s poems, stories, and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (Norton 2013), Callaloo, Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race (Scribner 2016), The Kenyon Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. She is the recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Aspen Summer Words Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, and she has been honored with two lifetime achievement notations, the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, and induction into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. Jeffers is Critic-at-Large for The Kenyon Review and Professor of English at University of Oklahoma.

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The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Oprah's Book Club Novel Aug 24, 2021

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

( 3,604 )

$12.99

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB SELECTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION • A FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION • SHORTLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • A Washington Post 10 Best Books of the Year • A Oprah Daily Top 20 Books of the Year • A BookPage Best Fiction Book of the Year • A Booklist 10 Best First Novels of the Year • A Kirkus 100 Best Novels of the Year • A Parade Pick • A Chicago Public Library Top 10 Best Books of the Year

An Instant Washington Post, USA Today, and Indie Bestseller

"Epic…. I was just enraptured by the lineage and the story of this modern African-American family…. A combination of historical and modern story—I’ve never read anything quite like it. It just consumed me." —Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Book Club Pick

An Indie Next Pick • A New York Times Book Everyone Will Be Talking About • A People 5 Best Books of the Summer • A Good Morning America 15 Summer Book Club Picks • An Essence Best Book of the Summer • A Time 11 Best Books of the Month • A Washington Post 10 Books of the Month • A CNN Best Book of the Month • A Ms. Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Goodreads Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A BookPage Writer to Watch • A USA Today Book Not to Miss • A Chicago Tribune Summer Must-Read • An Observer Best Summer Book • A Millions Most Anticipated Book • A Ms. Book of the Month • A Well-Read Black Girl Book Club Pick • A BiblioLifestyle Most Anticipated Literary Book of the Summer • A Deep South Best Book of the Summer • Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award

The 2020 NAACP Image Award-winning poet makes her fiction debut with this National Book Award-longlisted, magisterial epic—an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer—that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.

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The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan Poetry Series) Feb 20, 2020

by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

( 82 )

$9.99

In the shadow of the American Revolution, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry, Poems on various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). When Wheatley's book appeared, her words would challenge Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Her words would astound many and irritate others, but one thing was clear: this young woman was extraordinary. Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood with her parents in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters, and her untimely death at the age of about thirty-three.

Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley's "age"—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley's relationship to black people and their individual "mercies" is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history.

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The Glory Gets (Wesleyan Poetry Series) May 11, 2015

by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

( 1 )

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Winner of the Harper Lee Award (2018)

In her three previous, award-winning collections of blues poetry, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has explored themes of African American history, Southern culture, and intergenerational trauma. Now, in her fourth and most accomplished collection, Jeffers turns to the task of seeking and reconciling the blues and its three movements—identification, exploration, and resolution—with wisdom. Poems in The Glory Gets ask, "What happens on the road to wisdom? What now in this bewildering place?" Using the metaphor of "gets"—the concessional returns of living—Jeffers travels this fraught yet exhilarating journey, employing unexpected improvisations while navigating womanhood. The spirit and spirituality of her muse, the late poet Lucille Clifton, guide the poet through the treacherous territories other women have encountered and survived yet kept secret from their daughters. An online reader's companion will be available.

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Red Clay Suite (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) Mar 26, 2007

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

( 5 )

$9.99

In her third book of poems, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers expresses her familiarity with the actual and imaginary spaces that the American South occupies in our cultural lexicon. Her two earlier books of poetry, The Gospel of Barbecue and Outlandish Blues, use the blues poetic to explore notions of history and trauma. Now, in Red Clay Suite, Jeffersapproaches the southern landscape as utopia and dystopia—a crossroads of race, gender, and blood. These poems signal the ending movement of her crossroads blues and complete the last four “bars” of a blues song, resting on the final, and essential, note of resolution and reconciliation.

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The Gospel of Barbecue Mar 12, 2001

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

( 1 )

$10.99

“Honoree Jeffers is an exciting and original new poet, and the Gospel of Barbecue is her aptly titled debut work. These poems are sweet and sassy, hot and biting, flavored in an exciting blend of precise language and sharp and surprising imagery that delights. They leave a taste in your mouth, these poems; they are true to themselves and to the world. They are gospel, indeed, and this young poet will be heard more and more spreading the true word. Good news!”—Lucille Cliffton

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Repealing National Prohibition: Second edition (Wick poetry first book series) Dec 11, 2000

by David E. Kyvig

( 8 )

$10.50

In this new edition of the most comprehensive study of the political reaction against the Eighteenth Amendment, a response that led to its reversal fourteen years later by the Twenty-first Amendment, David E. Kyvig examines the operation of the national liquor ban, discusses central issues of U.S. constitutional development, and illuminates continuing public policy issues of alcohol and drug control. Enjoying wide public support at first, upheld by both federal and state governments, and most importantly, embedded in the Constitution, the Eighteenth Amendment seemed impervious to change. Prohibition repeal required nothing short of a political earthquake'a near-total reversal of congressional and state dry law endorsement, more than simply shifts in ethnic power and cultural taste. Employing previously unexamined archival evidence, Kyvig calls attention to a little-known but broad-based bi-partisan movement led by the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment and the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. These organizations and their allies amassed political power, particularly within the Democratic party. In the midst of the Great Depression they engineered a complicated, yet very democratic process of formal constitutional change, in the end achieving the only amendment reversal in U.S. constitutional history.

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Wesleyan Poetry Series

by Charles Baudelaire, Adrian Blevins, Roberto Tejada, Tan Lin, Michael Collier, Mark Rudman, Rae Armantrout, Jack Spicer, James Dickey, Ed Roberson, Donald Revell, Jane Hirshfield, Charles Wright, Robert Bly, Don Bogen, Brenda Hillman, Leslie Scalapino, Heather McHugh, Maria Flook, Hilda Raz, Marianne Boruch, Jo&#227 Cabral de Melo Neto, o, Joseph Harrington, M. NourbeSe Philip, Peter Gizzi, David Ray, Alice Notley, Jean Valentine, Kazim Ali, David Ignatow, Mark Jarman, Guillaume Apollinaire, Piotr Sommer, Elizabeth Willis, Heather Christle, Pamela Alexander, Evie Shockley, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jena Osman, Lyn Hejinian, Annie Finch, Aimé Césaire, Joseph Ceravolo, James Tate, Barbara Guest, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Gerald Vizenor, Brenda Coultas, Harvey Shapiro, Fred Moten, Sarah Blake, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Rachel Zucker, Lee Ann Brown, Ben Doller, Stéphane Mallarmé, Shane McCrae, Robert Fernandez, Mark McMorris, Ted Greenwald, Blunt Research Group, Gina Athena Ulysse, Camille T. Dungy, Erín Moure, Abdelkéir Khatibi, Kerri Webster, sam sax, Yonatan Berg, Lorenzo Thomas, Sandra Simonds, Danielle Vogel, Michele Leggott, Will Harris, Hafizah Geter, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Andrea Brady, Wendy Xu, Kevin Killian, Robert Kirschten, Djelal Kadir, A. James Arnold, Clayton Eshleman, Rosemary Ceravolo, Parker Smathers, Hadley Guest, Eugene Ostashevsky, Norman Finkelstein, Miles Champion, Shannon Maguire, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Laura Vrana, Keith Waldrop, Genya Turovskaya, Bela Shayevich, Jacob Edmond, Blake Bronson-Bartlett, Matt Reeck, Joanna Chen, David St. John, Setaey Adamu Boateng, August Kleinzahler, David Lehman, Sandy Evans, Christopher Williams, Miriam Zolin, Sascha Feinstein, Paul Grabowsky

From Book 1: Poems devoted to family and the physical world.

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