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Author Talk: Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

Misbehaving at the Crossroads

The DC Public Library is excited to host Honoree Fanone Jeffers for her new book Misbehaving at the Crossroads in partnership with MahoganyBooks.

For reasonable accommodations, please contact the Center for Accessibility at 202-727-2142 or DCPLaccess@dc.gov. For ASL or tactile interpretation, please allow at least seven (7) days notice.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She’s the author of five critically acclaimed books of poetry. Her first novel (and sixth book), The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, is forthcoming from Harper on August 24, 2021. 

Through the perspective of one young, Black girl, Ailey Pearl Garfield, Love Songs tells the stories of several generations of Ailey’s family in central Georgia, from the Removal of Indigenous people(s) to the enslavement and freedom of African Americans, and through to our present, fractious day. Love Songs has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and BookList. In addition, Love Songs has received positive mentions in Atlanta Journal Constitution, Essence, The New York Times, Observer, and was named an “anticipated” book by Ms. and GoodReads—and BookPage has called Honorée “a writer to watch.”

Honorée’s latest book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, is 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. The Age of Phillis won the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Literary Work: Poetry, was long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry, was a finalist for both the 2021 PEN/Volcker Award and the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, and The Age of Phillis was chosen as the “common read” for the scholarly conference, Society of Early Americanists for the academic year of 2020-2021. 

Honorée has won fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Aspen Summer Words Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress.  In consideration of Honorée’s scholarly research on Phillis Wheatley Peters, she was elected to the American Antiquarian Society, a learned organization to which fourteen U.S. Presidents have been elected. She has won the 2018 Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, and in 2020, she was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame; both notations recognize lifetime achievement.

Honorée is Professor of English at University of Oklahoma in Norman, where she has taught since 2002. 

About the Book

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.

Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

In Misbehaving at the Crossroads, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.  

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