Honoree jeffers biography

Blog interview, November 29, 2010

2011 NEA Literature Fellow Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of three books of poetry: The Gospel of Barbecue (winner of the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize); Outlandish Blues; and Red Clay Suite (a winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition). She has received an award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including African American Review, Callaloo, and The Gettysburg Review. Jeffers is a native southerner but now lives on the prairie where she is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and teaches creative writing. We spoke with the poet via e-mail about the writing life.

NEA: What's your version of the writing life?

HONORÉE FANONNE JEFFERS: My full-time job---what my family would call my "real job"--is that of a college professor. And I teach ten months out of the year. So I can't write every single day, all day, because I don't always have the emotional energy or time, but I do write whenever the spirit moves me. I get a poem coming to me in the shower and I keep saying the words over and over so I won't lose them in the hot water. Or, I wake from a dream, write the words down, and then roll back over and go to sleep. I wish I could say that I had rituals because that would make me sound really wise and smart, but I don't. Nothing's regular with me. I just try to stay open to the poem. Years ago, Ms. Lucille Clifton advised me to do that once and that advice has held me in good stead.

NEA: What do you plan to do with your NEA fellowship, and what impact do you expect the grant will have on your writing life?

JEFFERS: My current manuscript-in-progress is a book of poems imagining the life and times of Phillis Wheatley, the 18th-century American p

American poet and novelist (born 1967)

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (born 1967) is an American poet and novelist, and a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She has published five collections of poetry and a novel. Her 2020 collection The Age of Phillis reexamines the life of American poet Phillis Wheatley, based on years of archival research; it was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, and won the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry. Her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, was published by HarperCollins in 2021.

Biography

Jeffers was born in Kokomo, Indiana, and raised Catholic in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. Her mother's family is from Eatonton, Georgia; her father's family, she recounted, was "black bourgeois and fair skinned" (her father, Lance Jeffers, was also a poet), and they were not happy when he married a working-class, darker-skinned woman. Jeffers wrote about her family background in Red Clay Suite (2007), and said in an interview: "The only families I have known are my mother's folk, and my mother's parents were sharecroppers. So I write about her family's land and what this land means to me".

Jeffers graduated from Talladega College in 1996, and then got an MFA from the University of Alabama. In a 2004 interview with Callaloo journal, she recalled being the only Black poet in her creative writing program, and both standing on the shoulders of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and moving away from it, for instance in the BAM's lack of acceptance of homosexuality. Comparing the more radical poetry she wrote while at Alabama with her later work, Jeffers said that she had "discovered a need to represent subtlety and emotional interrogation". She is a full professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches creative writing.^[6]

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (born 1967) is an American poet and novelist, and a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She has published five collections of poetry and a novel. Her 2020 collection The Age of Phillis reexamines the life of American poet Phillis Wheatley, based on years of archival research; it was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, and won the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry. Her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, was published by HarperCollins in 2021.

Biography

Jeffers was born in Kokomo, Indiana, and raised Catholic in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. Her mother's family is from Eatonton, Georgia; her father's family, she recounted, was "black bourgeois and fair skinned" (her father, Lance Jeffers, was also a poet), and they were not happy when he married a working-class, darker-skinned woman. Jeffers wrote about her family background in Red Clay Suite (2007), and said in an interview: "The only families I have known are my mother's folk, and my mother's parents were sharecroppers. So I write about her family's land and what this land means to me".

Jeffers graduated from Talladega College in 1996, and then got an MFA from the University of Alabama. In a 2004 interview with Callaloo journal, she recalled being the only Black poet in her creative writing program, and both standing on the shoulders of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and moving away from it, for instance in the BAM's lack of acce

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Her first novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, is forthcoming from Harper in July 2021; in addition, she’s the author of five books of poetry, most recently, The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan, 2020), based upon fifteen years of research on the life and times of Phillis Wheatley (Peters), a formerly enslaved person who was the first African American woman to publish a book. Jeffers’s poems, stories, and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (Norton 2013), Callaloo, Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race (Scribner 2016), The Kenyon Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. She is the recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Aspen Summer Words Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, and she 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 Critic-at-Large for The Kenyon Review and Professor of English at University of Oklahoma.