Nicole Dennis-Benn

Nicole Dennis-Benn (born c. 1982 She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is an out lesbian and feminist author who explores themes of gender, sexuality, Jamaican life, and its diaspora in her works. Her voice has been described as bold and provocative with an urgency to tell the stories she'd always wanted to read as a young girl growing up in Jamaica. Her books have remained as must-reads on various major lists since publication and have been translated into multiple languages, including German, Italian, French, and Portuguese. Her 3rd and 4th novels were acquired by Random House in auction.

Life Nicole Dennis-Benn was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. Her family lived in Vineyard Town, where she spent most of her childhood before moving to Portmore, St. Catherine. When she was 11 years old, Dennis-Benn won an academic scholarship to the prestigious St Andrew High School for Girls in Kingston. She left Jamaica at 17. In America, she went on to attend college, receiving a bachelor's degree in Biology and Nutritional Sciences from Cornell University. She wrote throughout her college years to cope with her homesickness and found that she enjoyed writing more than her pre-med courses. After graduation, she pursued a master's degree in Public Health, specializing in women's reproductive health, at the University of Michigan's top ranking MPH program in Ann Arbor. Dennis-Benn then went on to work as a Project Manager in Gender, Sexuality and Health Research in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health for four years before finally deciding to pursue her passion as a writer.

While working at Columbia, she received her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative writing, Fiction, from Sarah Lawrence College.

Marriage Nicole married her wife, Dr. Emma Benn, in May 2012 in Jamaica. Their wedding became a viral sensation on the island, making national news because “the media [had] played it out as the first lesbian wedding” on the island. Despite fears about their high visibility as "out" lesbians, their desire to have an outdoor ceremony, and the history of attacks on same-sex couples on the island, they were able to find a safe venue. Dennis-Benn describes parts of Jamaica as safer for same-sex couples and has committed and engaged LGBTQ friends on the island. She and her wife were married the same year that same-sex marriage became legal in New York in 2012 where they had their initial wedding ceremony. In Jamaica, friends and family joined to celebrate, with many curious and excited hotel staffers, all taking pictures of the ceremony. which became a Read with Jenna Today Show Book-club pick. Nicole Dennis-Benn is a two time Lambda Literary Award winner for her novels, Here Comes the Sun and PATSY. Dennis-Benn is a recipient of the National Foundation for the Arts Grant. She was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize; long-listed for the Pen/Faulkner Award in Fiction and short-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her novels have appeared on several must-read and best-of-book lists.

Writing Nicole Dennis-Benn's work challenges issues of “homophobia...sexualization of young girls, race, class, [and] socioeconomic disparities” In 2010, while bringing her partner to visit Jamaica, she was confronted again by all of these issues, and her own identity. This solidified her decision to become a writer rather than continue her medical career. Her writing is often described in literary reviews as "harsh," "striking," and "engaging." Her tone does what she intends in order to expose the controversial underside of Jamaica's flashy tourism. Dennis-Benn hopes that Jamaicans can see and hear themselves in her stories. Above all, she hopes to show that Jamaica is more than a tourist destination, depicting the reality and daily lives of the people. Dennis-Benn describes her work as "love letters" to her homeland. The dialogue in her stories and novels is written in the patois dialect. Jennifer Senior describes it as "one of the book's [Here Comes the Sun's] incidental pleasures, its own melodious tune." It gives insight into Jamaican culture and Dennis-Benn's "internal speech." An excerpt was published in feminist magazine Lenny Letter in 2017. The excerpt reveals a similar use of the patois dialect and themes of identity, motherhood, gender, class, and immigration.

Themes Dennis-Benn's works often cover themes of identity, race, class, sexuality, colonialism, mother-daughter relationships, and inter-generational traumas.

Sexuality Her works address two sides of sexuality, the issue of being LGBT in Jamaica and the sexualization of young girls, especially by older men. Dennis-Benn was motivated to write because of these issues and her own experiences with them. Like the author, her heroine, Margot, in Here Comes the Sun lives a closeted life on Jamaica. According to Rosamond S. King, there is an increase in portrayals of same-sex couples in Jamaican literature. She explains that "the publication of Dennis-Benn’s...first [novel] with major US publishers—and major marketing budgets... marks a sea change in the literary landscape” and a possible resulting change in the self-identification of more Jamaican women as LGBT.

While there is more openness today, and there are more literary portrayals of same-sex Caribbean characters, there are still violent signs of homophobia in Jamaica. Dennis-Benn explains that her ability to write came only once she was in America, and that other LGBT Jamaicans have had similar experiences. King writes that “the homophobia that made [LGBT authors] immigrate are taken up by the media to become an integral part of the story of the entire region.”

Racial prejudice and skin whitening Thandi, in Here Comes the Sun, struggles with her identity and popularity as a teenage girl because she is very dark skinned. She spends some of the little money her family has on cream from an old fisherman's wife, in an attempt to lighten her skin. Skin lightening is a booming industry in Jamaica, making huge profits. Thandi hopes to lighten her skin so that the boys at school will like her. They call her a "browning," and say that she will be more popular at the party she is invited to later in the school year if she has lighter skin. In an article exploring the skin bleaching culture in Jamaica, Rebekah Kebede interviews Jody Cooper who explains: "When you black in Jamaica, nobody see you."

The destructive force of tourism Tourism is a huge part of the Jamaican economy, though the money it brings in is tempered by the damage it causes to local communities and the environment. In Here Comes the Sun, Margot earns decent money at the local resort and Delores earns her money by conning tourists into buying her souvenirs. Dennis-Benn shows how people use the tourists in order to survive, but she also shows the terrible living conditions that her characters deal with as they struggle to buy enough food and the small fishing town crumbles down outside of the sight of the resort. Margot reflects on her poor school friends who are mothers and struggling even more without the chance to work at the hotel, but the only reason Margot seems to make good money is because she also does sex work. Dennis-Benn explains that as tourism picked up, "the developers and government alike became ravenous, indifferent" to the struggles of their people in the quest for profits. Tourism creates tremendous pressure on people to sell and perform.