Danzy Senna was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the
middle child of three children. Her mother is the poet and novelist Fanny Howe
Senna earned her B.A. from Stanford University and MFA in creative writing
from the University of California, Irvine, where she received several
creative writing awards. Danzy Senna's debut novel, Caucasia, was the winner
of the BOMC Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and of a Los Angeles Times
Best Book of the Year.
Senna lives in Los Angeles with her husband, novelist Percival Everett, and their sons, Henry and Miles.
You
Are Free: Stories
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Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Riverhead Trade; 1 edition (May 3, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1594485070
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.7 inches
A 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominated Book
From the bestselling author of Caucasia, riveting, unexpected stories
about identity under the influence of appearances, attachments, and longing.
Each of these eight remarkable stories by Danzy Senna tightrope-walks
tantalizingly, sometimes frighteningly, between defined states: life with
and without mates and children, the familiar if constraining reference
points provided by race, class, and gender. Tensions arise between a
biracial couple when their son is admitted to the private school where
they'd applied on a lark. A new mother hosts an old friend, still single,
and discovers how each of them pities-and envies- the other. A young woman
responds to an adoptee in search of her birth mother, knowing it is not she.
Where
Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History
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Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (May 12, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374289158
ISBN-13: 978-0374289157
Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
When Danzy Senna’s parents got married in 1968, they seemed poised to defy
history. They were two brilliant young American writers from wildly
divergent backgrounds—a white woman with a blue-blood Bostonian lineage and
a black man, the son of a struggling single mother and an unknown father.
They married in a year that seemed to separate the past from the present;
together, these two would snub the histories that divided them and embrace a
radical future. When their marriage disintegrated eight years later, it was,
as one friend put it, “the ugliest divorce in Boston’s history”—a violent,
traumatic war that felt all the more heartrending given the hopeful
symbolism of their union.
Decades later, Senna looks back not only at her parents’ divorce but beyond
it, to the opposing American histories that her parents had tried so hard to
overcome. On her mother’s side of the family she finds—in carefully
preserved documents—the chronicle of a white America both illustrious and
shameful. On her father’s she discovers, through fragments and shreds of
evidence, a no less remarkable history. As she digs deeper into this
unwritten half of the story, she reconstructs a longburied family mystery
that illuminates her own childhood. In the process, she begins to understand
her difficult father, the power and failure of her parents’ union, and,
finally, the forces of history.
Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is at once a potent statement of personal
identity, a challenging look at the murky waters of American ancestry, and
an exploration of narratives—the narratives we create and those we forget.
Senna has given us an unforgettable testimony to the paradoxes—the pain and
the pride—embedded in history, family, and race.
Senna reads from her personal history memoir "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" (2009)
Caucasia:
A Novel
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Reading level: Ages 18 and up
Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher: Riverhead Trade (February 1, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1573227161
ISBN-13: 978-1573227162
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
Read Stanley Crouch's Review of Caucasia
Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother,
intellectuals and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in 1970's Boston.
The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to
the outside world they can't be sisters: Birdie appears to be white, while
Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at the Afrocentric school
they attend. For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own
blackness.
Then their parents' marriage falls apart. Their father's new black
girlfriend won't even look at Birdie, while their mother gives her life over
to the Movement: at night the sisters watch mysterious men arrive with
bundles shaped like rifles.
One night Birdie watches her father and his girlfriend drive away with
Cole—they have gone to Brazil, she will later learn, where her father hopes
for a racial equality he will never find in the States. The next morning—in
the belief that the Feds are after them—Birdie and her mother leave
everything behind: their house and possessions, their friends, and—most
disturbing of all—their identity. Passing as the daughter and wife of a
deceased Jewish professor, Birdie and her mother finally make their home in
New Hampshire. Desperate to find Cole, yet afraid of betraying her mother
and herself to some unknown danger, Birdie must learn to navigate the white
world—so that when she sets off in search of her sister, she is ready for
what she will find.
Symptomatic
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Reading level: Ages 18 and up
Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Riverhead Trade (February 1, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1594480672
ISBN-13: 978-1594480676
Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.6 inches
A young woman moves to New York City for what promises to be a dream job.
Displaced, she feels unsure of her fit in the world. Then comes a look of
recognition, a gesture of friendship from an older woman named Greta who
shares the same difficult-to-place color of skin. On common ground, a
tenuous alliance grows between two women in racial limbo. So too, does the
older woman's unnerving obsession, leading to a collision of two lives
spiraling out of control. A beautifully written novel, at once suspenseful,
erotic, and tantalizingly clever, Symptomatic is a groundbreaking
contribution to the literature of racial identity.
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