Honoree Fanonne Jeffers in conversation with Nic Stone - The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Virtual Event

Honoree Fanonne Jeffers in conversation with Nic Stone - The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Virtual Event

Tuesday, Aug 24, 2021 7:00 PM

Location:
A Cappella Books on Facebook and YouTube Live

2020 National Book Award–nominated poet Honoree Fanonne Jeffers 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. 

A Cappella Books welcomes the author for a virtual conversation on her novel, “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois on Tuesday, August 24, at 7 PM (EST). Jeffers will appear in conversation with Atlanta's own Nic Stone, New York Times bestselling author of “Dear Martin” and “Clean Getaway.”

This event is free and open to the public. Watch the event live via the link to our Facebook page.

Pre-order your copy of “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” (which features a bookplate signed by the author) via the link below. At checkout, choose between the local delivery, curbside pick-up, or shipping options. For zip codes not listed in the above banner, select curbside pick-up or USPS shipping.

About the Book

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.

About the Author

Honorée Fannone 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.