Tracy Deonn

Tracy Deonn is an American author. Her debut novel Legendborn was a New York Times bestseller and received a Coretta Scott King–John Steptoe Award for New Talent and the 2021 Ignyte Award for Best Young Adult Novel. The sequel novel Bloodmarked was published in 2022 and also became a #1 New York Times bestseller.

Early life and education Deonn was raised in central North Carolina. As a child, she and her mother were fans of Star Wars, Star Trek, and science fiction and fantasy stories. However, she notes, "Growing up in North Carolina, there would be coursework as elementary and middle school, like, tell where your family came from, and this assumption that there was a European origin. And so, students could come to class and be like my family, way back when, they came from France or they came from Scotland. And for the Black American students, this was just this horrifying, sort of traumatic, school assignment that white instructors never really thought about how painful that was." While there, she was a member of the fraternity of St. Anthony Hall.

Her mother died in 2008, soon after Deonn graduated from UNC. Instead, Deonn spent a summer doing yoga and exploring San Francisco.

After her mother's death, Deonn did not write prose for ten years. This led to Simon & Schuster editor Liesa Abrams contacting Deonn to express interest in any YA fiction that Deonn might write. Deonn has said she feels the challenge and obligation as a Black writer, stating, "I think as a writer I need to be able to—I want to be able to—rep my community well, but it isn't possible to represent that whole population. All you can do is represent yourself and your own experiences. But that pressure is there and it's hard to juggle." It was nominated for a Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book and a Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book in 2021. Deonn drew inspiration from African-American folk magic and tied them together with her own experiences and family history. In particular, she employed themes present in retellings of the legend of King Arthur. Kirkus Reviews writes, "Representation of actualized, strong queer characters is organic, not forced, and so are textual conversations around emotional wellness and intergenerational trauma."

For Legendborn, Deonn won a Coretta Scott King–John Steptoe Award for New Talent from the American Library Association Book and Media Awards. She has also described Susan Cooper as a literary influence. In a review for USA Today, Felecia Wellington Radel described the book as "full of Black Girl Magic" and writes, "Bloodmarked excels in pushing against young-adult fantasy and hero's journey storytelling structures while also pushing the action-adventure forward, introducing even more lore and legend (and some modern Welsh language lessons, too), but not dawdling too much on the path to the next installment."

In a review for Tor.com, Alex Brown writes, "The racial politics Tracy Deonn explores in Bloodmarked is just as visceral the second time around as it was the first" and "This book in particular digs into the messiness of intergenerational responses to trauma and racial violence." Kirkus Reviews described the book as "A worthy successor to an explosive debut." It debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for Young Adult Hardcover books in 2022.

Publications

Novels

Anthologies

"Catalyst Rising". Cool. Awkward. Black.'' Viking. 2023. ISBN 9780593525098