Tara M Stringfellow Books in Order

Tara M. Stringfellow is a poet, novelist, and former attorney whose work returns often to Black Southern womanhood, family memory, art, and the meaning of home. Her family has deep roots in Memphis, Tennessee, though she spent much of her childhood in Okinawa, Japan, where her father served in the Marine Corps.

She knew early that words mattered to her. When she was three, her father read her a poem, and she asked him to begin again because she wanted to hear it all over. He encouraged her to take writing seriously, while also making clear that the world could be tougher on a Black woman who wanted to make art.

Poetry came first.

Stringfellow eventually became an attorney, but law was not where she wanted to stay. She left that career to focus on writing and earned an MFA from Northwestern University, becoming the school’s first MFA graduate in both poetry and prose. She has also taught and written poems and essays for a range of literary journals.

Her life has included plenty of movement. Along with Okinawa and Memphis, she has lived in Ghana, Chicago, Cuba, Spain, Italy, and Washington, D.C. Travel gave her distance from home, but Memphis remained the place her imagination kept circling back to.

Her first poetry collection, More Than Dancing, appeared in 2008. Years later, the political fear and anger she felt after the 2016 U.S. election pushed her toward fiction. Writing became a way to face racism, violence, and the stories that can be lost when families are not allowed to tell them in full.

That work became Memphis, her 2022 debut novel. The book follows young artist Joan North and the women in her family across generations, linking personal wounds to the history of a Black Memphis neighborhood. It became a national bestseller, was selected for the Read with Jenna book club, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Readers who enjoy Memphis often come for the family story and stay for its sense of place. The novel moves through painful history, but it also makes room for community, music, faith, tenderness, and the everyday work of women looking after one another.

In 2024, Stringfellow returned to poetry with Magic Enuff. The collection looks at love, anger, grief, family, and survival through the lives and voices of Black women, especially those connected to the South. Its poems can be direct and intimate, even when they are taking on big questions about freedom and belonging.

Stringfellow has made her home in Memphis again. She has described evenings on her porch swing with her hound, Huckleberry, listening to records and talking with neighbors. It feels fitting. Her books are interested in the places people leave, the places they return to, and what they carry with them either way.