Honorée
Fanonne Jeffers
She // Her // Hers
[ID: Honorée, a milk chocolate-brown Black woman with chin-length, curly black hair, wears light pink glasses, geometric earrings, and a navy dress with tiny white polka dots.]
Norman, OK
2021 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Jeffers is the author of five books of poetry, including 2020’s The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press), based on the life and times of Phillis Wheatley Peters, and the forthcoming novel The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (HarperCollins). Her essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poetry, and Jesmyn Ward’s The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, among others, and has been honored with two lifetime achievement notations—the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction and induction into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. Jeffers is a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.
Portrait photo by Sydney A. Foster.