Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is critic at large for the Kenyon Review. She is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, The Glory Gets (Wesleyan, 2015), and the forthcoming novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Harper, 2021). She has received fellowships from the Aspen Summer Words Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Witter Bynner Fellowship through the Library of Congress, as well as an award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, a lifetime achievement award. She is professor of English at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.
Nov/Dec 2020
Inspecting a Region of Converging Territory (Including Parts of Georgia, Alabama, & Tennessee), Which Contains Three Different Places Named “Etowah,” Where I am Trying to Locate the Birthplace of My Paternal Great-Great Grandmother Mahala Anderson Flippin, Who May or May Not Have Been a Cherokee Woman
Read a micro-conversation with the author here. Listed as Mulatto on the census twice before she died & was tossed aside by her son & her husband both of whom would […]
Fiction
Winter 2006
Come Day, Go Day
Cloletha was searching through the meat case when she saw Bo out of the corner of her eye, but she just kept right on looking through the packages of hamhocks. […]
Poetry
Summer 2002
Hagar to Sarai
Don't give me nothing in exchange for a beating in my belly, sore nipples way after the sucking is gone. Don't thank me for my body, a fine drinking skin […]
July/Aug 2019
“Mischief and Sorrow”: An Interview with Jericho Brown
I’ve known the celebrated poet Jericho Brown since he was a very young man: we first met in the early 2000s. I didn’t even know he was a poet then, […]
Summer 2012
The Blues: A Craft Manifesto 
The first slave ship landed on the shore and an African disembarked, meeting her fate. A couple of centuries and some change later, that slave’s great-great-great- and too-many-greats-to-mention descendants toted sacks down cotton rows, looked up at that fiendish sun. Bore the sacks up again.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, The Age of Phillis, and a 2020 inductee into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. She is […]