Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

Professor Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a poet, novelist, critic and scholar. Her first novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, was long-listed for the National Book Award, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, a finalist for the First Novel Prize of The Center for Fiction, a finalist for The Kirkus Prize for Fiction, nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Literary Work: Debut, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Price, and First Novelist’s Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Love Songs was an Oprah’s Book Club Pick, chosen by 44^th President Barack Obama for his “Favorite Books of 2021,” selected for over fifty lists of “Best Book of the Year,” including The New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, People, NPR, BookList, and Kirkus Review, named “A Book All Georgians Should Read,” and has been published internationally in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy.  

Professor Jeffers’ fifth book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, was chosen as the “Common Read” for the Society of Early Americanists for 2020-2021. The Age of Phillis was long-listed for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award, a finalist for the George Washington Prize, won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, won the NAACP Image Award for Literary Work: Poetry, and named a “Best Book of the Year” by NPR.  

Professor Jeffers' writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (Norton, 2013), Callaloo, Harper’s, Indiana Review, Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, New England Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others.  She has won fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, Revolutionary Spaces, the Vermont Studio Center, United States Artists through the Mellon Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress.  

For her scholarly research on Early African Americans, Professor Jeffers was elected to the American Antiquarian Society, a learned organization to which fourteen U.S. presidents have been elected, and she has been awarded two lifetime achievement notations for her creative writing, the Harper Lee Award for Alabama's Distinguished Writer of the Year, and induction into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame.  Professor Jeffers has taught at the University of Oklahoma since 2002 and holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English. 

Research and Teaching Interests:
Poetry Writing, Fiction Writing, Creative Nonfiction Writing, Writing for Creative Publication, Early African American Literature, Blues Poetics, and Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century African American Literature.

Bookshelf:

Novels

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Forthcoming: Harper, 2021)

Poetry Collections

The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020)
The Glory Gets (Wesleyan University Press, 2015)
Red Clay Suite (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007)
Outlandish Blues (Wesleyan University Press, 2003)
The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State University Press, 2000)

Visit Professor Jeffers' website