Andrea Hairston Books in Order

If you want the connected family saga: Redwood And Wildfire → Will Do Magic for Small Change → Archangels of Funk
If you want big-idea science fiction: Mindscape
If you want epic fantasy: Master of Poisons
If you want a strange, warm murder mystery: The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays
If you want essays and theatre too: Impolitic! → Lonely Stardust

Andrea Hairston was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a family of storytellers, big talkers, and people who knew how to spin a tale. As a kid, she talked so much in class that her mother told her to write stories instead of disrupting everyone else. She did, and those early adventure sagas never really stopped.

For a long time, though, writing was not the only future she imagined. Growing up in the 1950s, Hairston wanted to be a theoretical physicist or a mathematician. She studied at Smith College, later earned a master's degree at Brown, and for a while science looked like the straight road ahead.

Then theatre pulled harder.

Hairston has said that playing a willow tree in a childhood play helped hook her on the stage. By college she was all in, drawn to the way performance lets you step outside yourself and see the world from another angle. In graduate school she also studied German, spent time in Germany, and got deep into dramaturgy, the craft of connecting story, history, and audience. She later translated plays by Michael Ende and Kaca Celan from German into English.

Theatre came first in public. Hairston became the artistic director of Chrysalis Theatre, a long-running performance ensemble in western Massachusetts, and her plays have been produced at places including Yale Rep, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on public radio and television. She also taught for many years at Smith College, in theatre and Africana studies, and is now a professor emerita.

Science never left the room.

That mix of physics, folklore, politics, music, and performance runs through all of Hairston's fiction. Her debut novel, Mindscape, throws readers into a future Earth cut apart by the mysterious Barrier, where a fragile peace depends on a renegade mediator named Elleni. The book won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award, and it already showed what Hairston does so well, big speculative ideas, busy political worlds, and people who have to improvise their way through trouble.

Her best-known books keep widening the frame. Redwood And Wildfire follows Redwood Phipps and Aidan Wildfire from Georgia to Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, mixing hoodoo, performance, romance, and early film culture. It won the Otherwise Award and the Carl Brandon Kindred Award. Will Do Magic for Small Change returns to that family through Cinnamon Jones, who wants a life on stage while untangling grief, magic, and buried history. Much later in that same story line, Archangels of Funk gives us an older Cinnamon in a battered future, still building art, community, and stubborn hope.

She can go large when she wants to. Master of Poisons is epic fantasy, with Djola and Awa trying to survive a poisoned world of storms, spirits, and failing empires. The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays turns toward a stranger, warmer kind of mystery, with murder, multiverse oddness, and a dog at the center of the story. Even when the setting changes, Hairston keeps returning to artists, griots, conjurers, and other people whose job is to carry memory and imagine what comes next.

That is really the through line.

Across novels, essays, and plays, Hairston writes about community under pressure, history that refuses to stay buried, and imagination as a practical tool for survival. Her work often asks what stories do to us, who gets to tell them, and how art might help people make another world. Based in western Massachusetts, she continues to write and lead Chrysalis Theatre. She also bikes at night year-round.