Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (born 1967) is an American poet and novelist, and a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She has published five collections of poetry and a novel. Her 2020 collection The Age of Phillis reexamines the life of American poet Phillis Wheatley, based on years of archival research; it was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, and won the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry. Her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, was published by HarperCollins in 2021.

Biography Jeffers was born in Kokomo, Indiana, and raised Catholic in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. Her mother's family is from Eatonton, Georgia; her father's family, she recounted, was "black bourgeois and fair skinned" (her father, Lance Jeffers, was also a poet), and they were not happy when he married a working-class, darker-skinned woman. Jeffers wrote about her family background in Red Clay Suite (2007), and said in an interview: "The only families I have known are my mother's folk, and my mother's parents were sharecroppers. So I write about her family's land and what this land means to me". In a 2004 interview with Callaloo journal, she recalled being the only Black poet in her creative writing program, and both standing on the shoulders of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and moving away from it, for instance in the BAM's lack of acceptance of homosexuality. Comparing the more radical poetry she wrote while at Alabama with her later work, Jeffers said that she had "discovered a need to represent subtlety and emotional interrogation". She is a full professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches creative writing.

The Age of Phillis Background The life of Phillis Wheatley, the 18th-century American poet, is known mostly through the biographical sketch written by Margaretta Matilda Odell, a White woman, some fifty years after Wheatley's death in 1784. Odell claimed to have been related to the Wheatley family that had enslaved Phillis Wheatley (who soon after manumission and marriage to a John Peters changed her name to Phillis Peters). Scholars have noted how Odell's account "reads like a sentimental novel", erases the trauma of kidnapping and the Middle Passage, and all but wipes away the fact that the Wheatley family enslaved Phillis and others. Instead, it portrays Susanna Wheatley as a benevolent Christian who saves Phillis, and John Peters as a sexually threatening Black man who seduces Phillis and then leaves her financially ruined. which was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2020. Jeffers spent 15 years working on the book, and said: "I feel like Ms. Phillis chose me." The book was also nominated for the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry, and won. Oprah Winfrey announced on CBS This Morning that it was her new selection for Oprah's Book Club. The book was a finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. The novel was also longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction. Reviewing the novel in The Guardian, Kadish Morris wrote: "This book is mammoth in size and scope and, though at times it overspills with a surplus of details, is exceptional in the way it engages so deeply and emphatically with history."

Awards and honors

Literary awards

Honors Jeffers received the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction in 2018, Her work on Phillis Wheatley was recognized by the American Antiquarian Society, which inducted her into their organization.