Zakiya Dalila Harris Books in Order

Zakiya Dalila Harris was born and raised in Hamden, Connecticut, and she has spoken about growing up in a mostly white neighborhood and going to mostly white schools when she was young. That feeling of being part of a place and a little out of step with it shows up again and again in her work.

She fell in love with books early. As a kid, she tore through series like Goosebumps, Animorphs, and A Series of Unfortunate Events, then filled notebooks with stories of her own, from scary tales to superhero plots to stories about girls like her. Her father, a journalism teacher and newspaper columnist, read her work, pushed her to keep going, and made writing look like something a real grown-up could do.

One small contest helped make it real. At twelve, Harris entered a fiction contest in American Girl magazine without telling her parents, won, and saw her story in print. She has said that moment did a lot for her confidence as a writer.

In college she studied English literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and minored in creative writing. Then she moved to New York and earned an MFA in nonfiction creative writing from The New School. Before fiction took over, she was writing essays and reviews and thinking hard about race, culture, and the small social pressures that shape everyday life. Her nonfiction training seems to have stayed with her, especially in the way she notices tone, social performance, and what people choose not to say.

Publishing was the day job.

After graduate school, Harris worked in editorial at Knopf Doubleday, first as an assistant and later as an assistant editor. She loved talking about books, sentences, and structure, and she learned how a manuscript moves from acquisition to finished copy. But the job also sharpened her sense of how white the industry could be, especially for a young Black woman who was often the only one in the room. She has spoken plainly about the isolation of looking around a conference table and not seeing many faces like her own.

The spark for The Other Black Girl came from that world. Harris has described an encounter in an office bathroom with another Black woman she had never seen before, and the flood of thoughts that followed. Out of that moment grew Nella Rogers, the overworked editorial assistant at the center of The Other Black Girl, and a story about isolation, ambition, microaggressions, and the thin line between fitting in and selling out.

Finishing the book meant making a hard choice. When Harris was promoted and given more responsibility in publishing, she realized she could not give another writer's book her full attention and still seriously pursue her own. She left, worked part time at a cupcake shop and with a children's creative writing program, and kept going until the novel was done.

It was worth the leap.

Published in 2021, The Other Black Girl became a New York Times bestseller and later turned into a Hulu series. Readers came for the thriller setup, but a lot of them stayed for the office details, the dark humor, and the way Harris captures the exhausting calculations of being watched, underestimated, or asked to make other people comfortable. Her shorter suspense story His Happy Place carries some of that same energy into a more intimate setting, taking a romantic weekend away and making it feel quietly, steadily wrong.

Alongside fiction, Harris has also published essays and reviews, which helps explain why her work feels so alert to the language people use to sell themselves, dodge discomfort, or claim status. Across her writing, she returns to Black life, work, class, performance, and the uneasy gap between what people say and what they mean. She likes ordinary spaces, offices, apartments, cabins, and makes them feel charged. Even when the story bends toward satire or horror, the emotions underneath stay recognizably human.

These days she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and a growing collection of plants. She has said she loves writing about Blackness, books, creepy stuff, and oldies music, which is a pretty good guide to what readers will find on the page.