Elizabeth Nunez immigrated to the US from Trinidad after completing high school there. She received a PhD in English from New York University and is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, the City University of New York.
Dr. Nunez is the author of eight novels. Boundaries (Akashic Books, 2011), her most recent novel, was selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice and was nominated for a 2012 NAACP Image Award. Anna In-Between (Akashic Books, 2009) received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal and was a New York Times Editors' Choice. It was selected for the 2010 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for literary excellence. Nunez's other novels include Prospero’s Daughter (2010 Trinidad and Tobago One Book, One Community selection; New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, 2006 Florida Center for the Literary Arts One Book, One Community selection, and 2006 Novel of the Year for Black Issues Book Review); Bruised Hibiscus (American Book Award); Discretion (short-listed for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award); Grace; Beyond the Limbo Silence (Independent Publishers Book Award in Multicultural fiction category); and When Rocks Dance. Most of Nunez's novels have also been published as audio books, and two are in translation, in Spanish and German. Nunez has also written several monographs of literary criticism published in scholarly journals and is co-editor of the anthology, Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Woman Writers at Home and Abroad.
Nunez was co-founder of the National Black Writers Conference, which she directed for eighteen years with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was executive producer for the 2004 New York Emmy nominated series, Black Writers in America. Her recent awards include the 2011 Writers for Writers Award from Poets and Writers; a 2012 Lifetime Literary award from Trinidad and Tobago: and a 2013 Outstanding Trailblazer Award from the National Council for Research on Women. Nunez was among twelve writers, selected by the Folger Shakespeare Library and the PEN Faulkner Foundation, whose essays appeared in a chapbook celebrating the exhibition in Washington DC on “Shakespeare’s Sisters.” She is a member of several boards, including the Center for Fiction, and is a judge for several national and international literary awards, including the Dublin IMPAC International Literary Award. You may reach her at nuneznovels@gmail.com or on Facebook.
Boundaries
Click to order via Amazon
Hardcover: 275 pages
Publisher: Akashic Books (September 27, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1617750336
ISBN-13: 978-1617750335
Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
Nominated for a 2011 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Fiction
Read a review by the New York Times Oct 7, 2011
[If] “Boundaries,” Elizabeth Nunez’s latest novel…
seems familiar, that’s because it reflects the current state of
affairs [in publishing], which one black novelist recently called “seg-book-gation.”
If it also seems outlandish, it’s because of Nunez’s deft straddling
of realism and satire… There are many moments of elegant, overarching
insight that bind the personal to the collective past..[and the story]
flames out in a wickedly gripping climax.
—New York Times Book Review, October 9, 2011
“If I wore a hat, I’d tip it to novelist Elizabeth Nunez. I was
awestruck by 2000’s Bruised Hibiscus (Seal Press), her American Book
Award-winning story about the beautiful friendship of two Trinidadian girls
bound by an ugly secret they share… With Boundaries (Akashic Books),
her eighth work, the storyteller is in fine form... This time around Nunez
sets her sights on the issue of immigrant assimilation... Nunez’s
latest effort is timely and provocative—and it’s written with
such vivid prose that, despite the bittersweet ending, you’ll step
away from this refreshing take on contemporary publishing with a smile.”
—Essence, October 2011
About the Book
In an age of reality TV, a husband and wife cling to Victorian notions of
privacy, though doing so threatens the life of the wife. Their daughter Anna
yearns for her mother's unguarded affection, and eventually learns there is
value in restraint. But Anna, a Caribbean American immigrant, finds that
lesson harder to accept when, eager to assimilate in her new country, she
discovers that a gap yawns between her and American-born citizens.
The head of a specialized imprint at a major publishing house, Anna is soon
challenged for her position by an ambitious upstart who accuses her of not
really understanding American culture, particularly African American
culture. Her job at stake, Anna turns for advice to her boyfriend Paul, a
Caribbean American himself, who attempts to convince her that immigrants
must accept limitations on their freedom in America.
Told in spare and transcendent prose, Boundaries is a riveting immigrant
story, a fascinating look into the world of contemporary book publishing, a
beautiful extension of the exploration of family dynamics that began in
Nunez's previous novel Anna In-Between, and a heartwarming love story.
Anna In-Between
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Akashic Books (September 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1933354844
ISBN-13: 978-1933354842
Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1.4 inches
Anna In-Between is Elizabeth Nunez's finest literary achievement to date.
In spare prose, with laserlike attention to every word and the juxtaposition
of words to each other, Nunez returns to themes of emotional alienation,
within the context of class and color discrimination, so richly developed in
her earlier novels.
Anna, the novel's main character who has a successful publishing career in
the United States, is the daughter of an upper-class Caribbean family. While
on vacation in the island home of her birth she discovers that her mother,
Beatrice, has breast cancer. Beatrice categorically rejects all efforts to
persuade her to go to the United States for treatment, even though it is,
perhaps, her only chance of survival. Anna and her father, who tries to
remain respectful of his wife's wishes, must convince her to change her
mind.
Prospero's
Daughter
Click to order via Amazon
ISBN: 0345455355
Format: Hardcover, 304pp
Pub. Date: February 28, 2006
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
2006 Novel of the Year Black Issues Book Review
Praise for Prospero's Daughter
"Prospero's Daughter
is a stunning achievement. Elizabeth Nunez, with fluid,
vivid writing, guides the reader through a magical, dangerous landscape.
Beneath the unrelenting tropical sun, against the currents and tides of the
sea, a Caribbean island of secrets and shadows is laid bare. This is a novel
of thrilling twists and turns, describing a place of order and disorder.
Nunez has used Shakespeare's Tempest
as a point of departure--only that. Her vision of
this "brave new world" and its inhabitants, is wonderful, original. In
painterly prose, she unveils the landscape tempered by colonialism, she
unmasks the colonizer, and lifts the curtain that has been drawn across
history." "Michelle Cliff, author of Free
Enterprise
See the blurbs:
"Nunez critiques colonialist
assumptions about race and class in this ambitious reworking of
The Tempest, set in her native Trinidad in the early
1960s. . . . [It has] strong themes and dramatic ironies. Readers will find
her love story"which has a refreshingly happy ending"very sensitively told."
"Publishers Weekly
"PROSPERO'S DAUGHTER is a resounding success, one that should definitely establish [Elizabeth] Nunez's importance in English...literature." ―The Harvard Review.
Prospero's Daughter is a "gripping and richly
imagined"novel". Nunez, who is a master at pacing and plotting, explores the
motivations behind Caliban's outburst, hatching an entirely new story that
is inspired by Shakespeare, but not beholden to him". The key to her
exoneration of Caliban: give the women on the island a voice."
―New York Times Book Review . Also picked for Editor's Choice, NYTBR
Nunez is in top form with this ambitious interpretation of
Shakespeare's The Tempest. . . . Along with characters who virtually demand
attention, the novel's intense imagery, powerful themes of race and class,
and keen evocations of Caribbean land- and seascapes create a broad reader
appeal. Recommended.
―Library Journal
In Prospero's Daughter, Trinidad-born novelist Elizabeth
Nunez airlifts Shakespeare's The Tempest to a remote Caribbean island where
a demonically brilliant English doctor accuses his young local prot"g" (the
story's mixed-race Caliban) of trying to destroy his daughter's innocence.
Part romance, part detective story, part searing social critique, Nunez's
fiction, with its lush, lyric cadences and whirlwind narrative, casts a
seductive spell.
―O (Oprah's) Magazine
Exquisite retelling of The Tempest".Nunez's masterful story
plays out against the backdrop of Trinidadian hopes for independence,
achieved the following year. Simply wonderful.
―Kirkus Starred review
About the Book:
Prospero's Daughter is a brilliantly conceived, contemporary retelling of
Shakespeare's The Tempest, set in the lush Caribbean during the height of
tensions between the island population and British colonists. It is the
story of a boy and a girl who come of age and commit the ultimate taboo,
unfolding against a backdrop of intensely political and relevant questions
of race, class, and power.
Cut off from the main island of Trinidad by a glistening green sea, Chacachacare has few inhabitants, but for the lepers and a British doctor who fled from England with his three-year-old daughter, Virginia. An unconscionable genius, Peter Gardner had used his talents to unsavory ends, experimenting with his medicinal concoctions on unsuspecting patients, many of whom died from his treatments. Blackmailed by his own brother, Peter ends up on the small island, as England's colonial reach is starting to crumble.
There Peter focuses his experiments on the wild flora of the Caribbean- and
the orphan, Carlos, whose home he steals. Though deeming the boy inferior
because of the darkness of his skin, Peter decides to educate the "savage"
and schools the child alongside his own. But as Carlos and Virginia grow up
under the same roof, they become deeply and covertly attached to one
another-until Gardner finds out and accuses Carlos of a heinous crime.
It is up to a brusque, racially insensitive English inspector to discover
the truth. But when Peter's native housekeeper, Ariana, steps forward with
the shocking statement that Virginia and Carlos are in love, a disturbing
picture begins to emerge. For Ariana has her own reason for exposing Peter's
lies, as a monstrous secret is finally drawn into the light.
Grace
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ISBN: 0345455347
Format: Paperback, 352pp
Pub. Date: February 28, 2006
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Praise for Grace:
"Extremely deserving of its title, this gorgeous, meditative book is a graceful
rendering of one couple's journeys and explorations toward and away from each
other. A moving love story, it shows us how a deferred dream can erode a marriage
and how grace can sometimes put us to the test, even as it redeems."
―Edwidge Danticat
"Nunez's latest (after
Discretion) is a perceptive and moving tale of an African American middle-class
marriage struggling to right itself amid tremors of self-discovery".In
exquisitely tuned prose, Nunez depicts a man's lonely attempt to save his
marriage while honoring his roots."
―Publisher's Weekly
About the Book
Justin Peters is a Harvard-educated professor of British and classic literature
who reads Shakespeare to his four-year-old daughter, Giselle. A native of
Trinidad and the product of a strict, English-style education, Justin and his
focus on the works of "Dead White Men" receive little professional respect at
the public Brooklyn college where he teaches. But whatever troubles he might
have at work are eclipsed when he realizes his wife, Sally, has begun to pull
away from him, both physically and emotionally.
Harlem-born Sally Peters, a mother on the verge of turning forty, is a primary
school teacher who believes that joy is a learned skill, and that it takes
strength to be happy. After a life of tragic losses, Sally thought she had
finally found that strength when she met Justin.
But now, Sally wants something more. And Justin is angered by her uncertainty
about their life and frightened by the thought that perhaps Sally never stopped
loving the ex-boyfriend for whom she wrote fierce poems. Is he, Justin wonders,
responsible for helping Sally find meaning in her life"a life that seems to him
most fortunate? If Sally and Justin's union is to survive, both must face the
crippling echoes of their own pasts before those memories forever cloud and
alter their future.
Set in a snow-covered Brooklyn, Grace is a thoughtful and lovely
meditation on trust, redemption, and family. Elizabeth Nunez's delicate prose
brings the struggles, aches, and tender moments of this contemporary urban love
story into vivid focus.
Blue
Latitudes: Caribbean Woman Writers at Home and Abroad
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Elizabeth Nunez (Editor), Jennifer Sparrow (Editor)
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Seal Press (November 29, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1580051391
ISBN-13: 978-1580051392
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches
Stories from Blue Latitudes gathers the major and emerging women fiction
writers from the Caribbean, including Dionne Brand, Michelle Cliff, Merle
Collins, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, and Pauline
Melville. Similar themes grace their stories of life at home and abroad. In
some, the sexual exploitation of Caribbean girls and women becomes a
metaphor for neocolonialism, a biting rejoinder to enticing travel brochures
that depict the Caribbean as a tropical playground and encourage Americans
to "make it your own." Other tales deal with the sad legacy of colonial
history and the ways in which race, skin color, and class complicate
relationships between men and women, parents and children.
But whether writing about childhood or adulthood, life in the islands or
life abroad, the writers express their particular concerns with a passion
that comes from lived experience, and with a love of place and a feminist
sensibility that are accessible to new readers of Caribbean literature as
well as to an academic audience. "What matters is how well we have told our
tale, how well we have drawn pictures of the people and places we write
about, " Nunez says. And indeed, this anthology makes those pictures come
alive.
Discretion
ISBN: 0345447328
Format: Paperback, 276pp
Pub. Date: July 2003
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Read an Excerpt from Discretion
About the Book
From American Book Award-winning author Elizabeth Nunez, a powerful novel that
explores an intricate lovers' triangle, the human thirst for passion, and the
myriad ways desire can betray those who have fallen under its spell.
Descended from warriors and raised by missionaries, Oufoula is a diplomat whose wealth and charm make him both publicly admired and envied. From a tragic childhood he emerged a man who leads a disciplined life of respect, married to Nerida, a woman he did not want to deceive. But the beautiful Marguerite, a Jamaican-born artist living in New York, makes him question what ideals he can live by, and which values he can betray.
For twenty years, Oufoula has carried a secret in his heart, a secret of his love for Marguerite. Though they have been separated for two decades by Marguerite's call for propriety, Oufoula refuses to let his desire wane. When the lovers are at last reunited, the rekindling of their passion forces Oufoula to come to terms with the core of his character: Is he willing to sacrifice his marriage, his career, and the very foundations of the life he has struggled to create, all for the love of one woman?
Oufoula's confession is adorned with the literature of his European education, and shrouded by the spirits and responsibilities of Africa. Caught between myth and reason, Oufoula reveals himself to be a soul trapped in every way, who, like Faust, would bargain with the devil for fulfillment . . . but was never offered any choice.
This is the portrait of a man who cannot be forgotten. A gripping, masterfully crafted tale of love, deceit, and the human compulsion for power. Discretion forces us to reconsider that ever-compelling question: At what price passion?
Bruised Hibiscus
ISBN: 0345451090
Format: Paperback, 304pp
Pub. Date: March 2003
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
"Bruised Hibiscus is an
American masterpiece."
―Sapphire, author of Push
Praise for Bruised Hibiscus
"I just finished Bruised
Hibiscus and the book is nothing short of AMAZING! Easily, one of the best books
of the year. I'm ready to climb the proverbial mountain and sing its
praises."
―Thumper,
AALBC.com
About the Book
An incendiary, brilliantly imagined new novel by Elizabeth
Nunez, Bruised Hibiscus is a spellbinding tale of explosive passions.
In the village of Otahiti on the island of Trinidad, a fisherman pulls the body of a white woman from the sea. News travels quickly through the small island, and the conclusion "man-woman business" prevails as the assumed motive for the murder. The rage that surfaces as a result of the murder--born of generations of colonialism, sexual oppression and class disparity--is the catalyst for the reunion of two childhood friends, Rose and Zuela.
Inseparable companions during the August holidays of their twelfth year, the two girls witness an unspeakable act through the leaves of a hibiscus bush and shame divides them for twenty years. Rosa, from a family of white plantation owners, falls in love with a black school headmaster named Cedric. Zuela marries a Chinese immigrant three times her age and gives birth to ten children in as many years. Although their lives diverge, both women suffer at the hands of the men they marry. Memories of the horror witnessed at the hibiscus bush resurface upon hearing about the murdered woman, bringing Rosa and Zuela together in a desperate search for liberation.
Vivid and impassioned, Bruised Hibiscus is a story of collective memory and personal history, of power and oppression, and ultimately, of the struggle for freedom.
Beyond the Limbo Silence
ISBN: 0345451082
Format: Paperback, 321pp
Pub. Date: July 2003
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
"This powerful illumination of race and culture by the light of dreams, ritual, and Vodoun will remind many of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker." "Booklist (starred review)
"Beyond the Limbo Silence should garner the large readership that
Elizabeth Nunez deserves. This novel reads like a fable, with its legends,
mythic creatures and memorable characters. Ms. Nunez has shown that one doesn't
have to travel south of the border to find magic realism. And though it has
become a clich" to call an author's writing 'beautiful,' this adjective
accurately describes the writing in Beyond the Limbo Silence."
―Ishmael Reed
About the Book
When Sara Edgehill is given a scholarship to leave Trinidad and attend a
college in Wisconsin, she is thrilled. America, the one she has seen in the
movies, is a land of dreams, prosperity, and equality. Not like Trinidad,
where her parents cast disappointed glances her way because she wasn't born
with lighter-colored skin. But when Sara leaves her island's brilliant green
fields and warm sparkling waters for the pale cornfields of the Midwest, the
ties to her home and her past grip her as strongly as America's cold, winter
winds.
For as soon as Sara sets foot in her new home, she must make tough
decisions. Wanting desperately to fit in, she begins to understand that in
America, the color lines run deeper than they did even in Trinidad. And as
Sara forms ties with two other West Indian students"the beguiling, haunted
Courtney and the passionate, vivacious Sam"she is irrevocably pulled into
the very center of America's exploding civil rights movement.
Stories
from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad
Click to order via Amazon
Elizabeth Nunez (Editor), Jennifer Sparrow (Editor)
ISBN: 1580051391
Format: Paperback, 288pp
Pub. Date: December 2005
Publisher: Avalon Publishing Group
Stories from Blue Latitudes gathers the major and emerging women fiction writers from the Caribbean, including Dionne Brand, Michelle Cliff, Merle Collins, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kinkaid, Paule Marshall, and Pauline Melville. Similar themes grace their stories of life at home and abroad. In some, the sexual exploitation of Caribbean girls and women becomes a metaphor for neocolonialism, a biting rejoinder to enticing travel brochures that depict the Caribbean as a tropical playground and encourage Americans to "make it your own." Other tales deal with the sad legacy of colonial history and the ways in which race, skin color, and class complicate relationships between men and women, parents and children.
But whether writing about childhood or adulthood, life in the islands or life abroad, the writers express their particular concerns with a passion that comes from lived experience, and with a love of place and a feminist sensibility that are accessible to new readers of Caribbean literature as well as to an academic audience. "What matters is how well we have told our tale, how well we have drawn pictures of the people and places we write about, " Nunez says. And indeed, this anthology makes those pictures come alive.
Defining Ourselves : Black Writers in the 90s Elizabeth Nunez (Editor), Brenda
M. Greene (Editor)
Format: Paperback, 250pp.
ISBN: 0820442615
Publisher: Lang, Peter Publishing, Incorporated
Pub. Date: April 1999
About the Book
Defining Ourselves offers perspectives on black
literature in the 1990s by twenty-nine black writers and critics, including
Paule
Marshall, Amiri Baraka, John A. Williams,
Ishmael Reed, Walter Mosley,
Marita Golden,
Thulani Davis, Jill Nelson, Arthur Flowers,
Lorna Goodison,
Bebe Moore Campbell, Brent
Staples, Terry McMillan, Stanley Crouch, Houston A. Baker Jr., Barbara Christian, Karla FC
Holloway, and William W. Cook. The essays in this book are based on papers presented at
the Fourth National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College of the City
University of New York, which focused on the question of whether or not black literature
in the 90s is experiencing a renaissance to end all renaissances. In addition to this
topic, this book addresses the issues of the universality of black literature, the
changing tastes and concerns of black readers, and the politics of publishing.
When
Rocks Dance Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 320pp.
ISBN: 0345380681
Publisher: Ballantine Books, Inc.
Pub. Date: October 1992
Edition Desc: 1st Ballantine Books trade ed
Nunez's Work in incuded in the folowing Anthologies
Trinidad Noir
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Paperback: 340 pages
Publisher: Akashic Books (August 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1933354550
ISBN-13: 978-1933354552
Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.1 x 1.2 inches
Trinidad Noir reveals the Caribbean island's darkness and its appeal with an unexpected and gratifying result. Features brand-new stories by Robert Antoni, Elizabeth Nunez, Lawrence
Scott, Ramabai Espinet, Shani Mootoo, Kevin Baldeosingh, Vahni Capildeo, Willi Chen, Lisa Allen-Agostini, Keith Jardim, Reena Andrea Manickchand, Tiphanie Yanique, and more.
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