Honoree Fanonne Jeffers Books in Order

If you want the big, sweeping novel: The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois
If you want historical poetry: The Age of Phillis
If you want her blues-rooted poetry in order: The Gospel of Barbecue → Outlandish Blues → Red Clay Suite → The Glory Gets
If you want essays, memoir, and criticism: Misbehaving at the Crossroads

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers was born in Kokomo, Indiana, and grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. She writes across poetry, fiction, and essays, but her books speak to one another. Again and again, she returns to Black history, family memory, the American South, and the way private lives carry the weight of public history.

Language got to her early.

Jeffers has said that one of her first memories of its power came from listening to her father, Black Arts Movement poet Lance Jeffers, read in Durham when she was a small child. She remembers the room answering back, with people shouting and crying the way they might in church. That mix of music, speech, and feeling stayed with her, and you can hear it later in the rhythm and directness of her own work.

She studied at Talladega College and later earned an MFA at the University of Alabama. In that creative writing program, she was the only Black poet, an experience that pushed her to think hard about voice, audience, and tradition. The early books, The Gospel of Barbecue, Outlandish Blues, and Red Clay Suite, already show the questions that would keep shaping her writing.

Place matters in her work.

Her maternal family is from Eatonton, Georgia, and Jeffers has spoken about spending summers there with her grandmother and a wide circle of relatives. Gardens, porches, spirituals, food, and family stories were part of that world, and they show up again and again in her writing. Readers who love her poems often point to that groundedness, the way a meal, a patch of land, or a remembered voice can open into something much larger.

Books like Outlandish Blues and Red Clay Suite helped define her blues-rooted approach to poetry, where music is not just a subject but also a way of thinking. Then The Glory Gets turns toward wisdom, womanhood, and what comes after injury. Even when Jeffers is writing about slavery, racism, faith, or desire, the language stays close to ordinary speech. It sounds lived in.

Her long project The Age of Phillis took more than fifteen years to write. In that book, Jeffers used archival research and imagination to reframe the life of Phillis Wheatley Peters, looking beyond the flat versions history often leaves behind. The result is part poetry, part historical recovery, and part argument for seeing a famous figure as a person. The book won the NAACP Image Award for Poetry, and it shows how naturally Jeffers can bring scholarship and feeling onto the same page.

She made her fiction debut with The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, a multigenerational novel centered on Ailey Pearl Garfield and her Georgia family. The book became an Oprah's Book Club pick and later won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Readers often come for the sweep of the story, then stay for the women at its center, the family history, and the careful attention to how love and violence can live side by side in one inheritance.

Jeffers has also written essays and criticism, and Misbehaving at the Crossroads brings many of her core concerns into nonfiction: Black women's lives, ancestry, politics, respectability, and survival. She has taught at the University of Oklahoma since 2002 and holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English. That mix of teacher, researcher, and storyteller helps explain her range. Whether she is writing about a family table, an eighteenth-century poet, or a young woman trying to understand where she comes from, Jeffers keeps asking the same hard, human question: how do we live with history and still make a life of our own?