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

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.