About

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an essayist, novelist, poet, and a student of United States’ history. She is the author of seven books spanning three genres.

Her first novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois was an instant New York Times bestseller, an Oprah’s Book Club pick, and included on President Barack Obama’s reading list. Most recently, Love Songs was included on the “Great American Novels” list of The Atlantic and the “Best Books of the 21^st Century” list by Kirkus Reviews. Love Songs won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction, the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature, and the First Novelist’s Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Love Songs was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Fiction, the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the NAACP Image Award for Literary Work: Debut. Love Songs was longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction and appeared on several “year’s best” lists, including Time, People, NPR, and The New York Times.

Love Songs has been translated into several languages and was a Première Sélection for Le Grand Prix de Littérature Americaine for the French translation, Les Chants d’Amour de Wood Place, and chosen by NRC as one of “The Best Books” of the year for the Dutch translation, De Liefdesliederen van W.E.B. du Bois.

An award-winning poet, Honorée has published five books of poetry, including The Age of Phillis, based upon fifteen years of archival research on the life and times of Phillis Wheatley Peters, a formerly enslaved person who was the first Africana woman to publish a book in the Americas. The Age of Phillis won the NAACP Image Award for Literary Work: Poetry and the Lenore Marshall Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the George Washington Prize in History, the PEN/Voelcker Award and The Los Angeles Times Book Award. The Age of Phillis was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry, appeared on the “year’s best” lists for Library Journal and NPR. The Age of Phillis is taught in classrooms around the United States and was chosen as the “common read” for the Society of Early Americanists.

An Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review, Honorée is the recipient of the USA Mellon fellowship, as well as fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Aspen Summer Words Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. Honorée has been recognized with two lifetime achievement notations: she has won the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, and she was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. In consideration of her scholarly research on Phillis Wheatley Peters and early African Americans, she was elected to the American Antiquarian Society, a learned organization to which fourteen U.S. presidents have been elected.

Jeffers’s seventh book Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings is forthcoming from Harper on June 24, 2025.