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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers Book Launch
August 26, 2021 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Magic City Books is thrilled to welcome poet Honoree Fanonne Jeffers for a virtual launch event celebrating her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois. Jeffers is a National Book Award finalist and won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. She is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Oklahoma.
This virtual event will be hosted on the Zoom platform and Facebook Live. To register in advance for the event on Zoom visit: https://magiccitybooks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Pr86vkpvSN-BzF02a72OTg.
After registering you will receive a confirmation with details on how to join the event on Thursday, August 26 at 7:00 pm CT.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is on sale now. To order a copy you can visit Magic City Books in person or order online: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/the-love-songs-of-w-e-b-du-bois/556.
About The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
“This sweeping, brilliant and beautiful narrative is at once a love song to Black girlhood, family, history, joy, pain… and so much more. In Jeffers’ deft hands, the story of race and love in America becomes the great American novel.” –Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone and Another Brooklyn
- A People 5 Best Books of the Summer
- An Essence Best Book of the Summer
- A Ms. Most Anticipated Book of the Year
- A Goodreads Most Anticipated Book of the Year
- A Book Page Writer to Watch
- An Observer Best Summer Book
- A BiblioLifestyle Most Anticipated Literary Book of the Summer
- A Deep South Best Book of the Summer
The 2020 National Book Award-nominated poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epic–an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer–that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.
The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans–the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers–Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.
Ailey is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women–her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries–that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead.
To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors–Indigenous, Black, and white–in the deep South. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story–and the song–of America itself.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections, including The Age of Phillis, which won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, was longlisted for a National Book Award, and was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. She was a contributor to The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward, and has been published in the Kenyon Review, the Iowa Review, and other literary publications. Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, whose members include fourteen US presidents, and is critic at large for the Kenyon Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Oklahoma.
