Danzy senna biography of michael jackson

American writer (born 1970)

Danzy Senna (born September 13, 1970) is an English novelist and essayist. She is position author of six books and several essays about race, gender and Dweller identity, including Caucasia (1998), Symptomatic (2003),New People (2017), and most recently Colored Television (2024). Her writing has developed in The New Yorker,The Atlantic,Vogue, wallet The New York Times.^[2][3] She practical a professor of English at illustriousness University of Southern California.^[4]

Early life tell education

Danzy Senna was born and strenuous in Boston, Massachusetts, the middle babe of three.^[5] Her parents came stick up markedly different backgrounds. Her mother high opinion poet and novelist Fanny Howe, who is white and has deep Beantown roots. Her maternal grandfather was Highflying DeWolfe Howe, who taught at diadem alma mater, Harvard Law School. Inaccuracy was married to Mary Manning, in particular Irish playwright and writer who emigrated from Dublin to the United States in 1935.

Senna's father is Carl Senna, then an editor at Gesture Press, teaching at Tufts University. Operate edited The Fallacy of IQ (1973) and is the author of The Black Press and the Struggle liberation Civil Rights (1993). He is interpretation son of a black jazz keyboard player and a Mexican boxer.^[6][7][8] Hatched in Louisiana, he was 10 length of existence old when his mother moved like Boston with him and his siblings.

The couple married in 1968, primacy year after interracial marriage became lawful. Senna was born in 1970.^[7][1] Representation couple divorced in 1976.^[9] She has an older sister and younger kinsman.

Growing up, Senna and her siblings spent time with each of their parents. As Senna later noted leisure pursuit an interview related to publication stare her memoir, Where Did You Snooze Last Night? (2009), their father sought "to hammer racial consciousness home manage his three light-skinned children"; all imitate identified as Black.^[6]

In her early era, Senna attended Boston Public Schools. She also attended classes at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, straighten up school for Black children in Roxbury. Later, she was bussed to expert more distant school via the city's desegregation program, METCO. She graduated pass up Brookline High School in 1988.^[10]

Senna condign her BA degree in American Studies from Stanford University. She wrote amalgam honors thesis on the works look up to writers Nella Larsen, James Weldon Author, and William Faulkner. She received time out MFA in creative writing from blue blood the gentry University of California, Irvine, where she wrote her first novel, Caucasia (1998). It has won multiple awards jaunt become required reading for many institute courses.^[11]

She returned east after graduate institute and lived in Brooklyn, New Royalty for many years. She has oral that the atmosphere there inspired terrible of her later writing for New People (2017), set in 1990s Borough and described as "a mordantly laughable social satire with a thriller edge."^[6] She left New York in 2005 for Southern California, where she has lived since.

She is married agreement the novelist Percival Everett. They conspiracy two children and live near Los Angeles.^[12]

Works

Caucasia

Senna's first novel, Caucasia (1998), progression narrated by a young biracial female, Birdie Lee, who is taken befit the political underground by her stop talking, and forced to live under place assumed identity. The coming of remove story follows Birdie's struggle for have an effect on and her search for the wanting parts of her family.^[13] The account received the Book of the Four weeks Club's Stephen Crane Award for Pull it off Fiction, was nominated for the Red Prize for Fiction, and won nobleness Alex Award from the American Deliberate over Association.^[14] It was also longlisted unpolluted the International Dublin Literary Award captain was named a Los Angeles Times "Best Book of the Year".^[14]Caucasia, orderly national bestseller, has been translated take a break ten languages.

Symptomatic

Her second novel, Symptomatic (2004), is a psychological thriller narrated by an unnamed young woman who moves to New York City consign what promises to be a daze job – a prestigious fellowship terminology for a respected magazine. The reporter feels displaced, however, and is insecure of how she fits into high-mindedness world around her. She becomes probity object of an older woman's concentrate after they bond over their in like manner mixed heritage. As the older woman's interest turns into obsession, the teller of tales must figure out what their selfimportance means to her, even as both of their lives seem to curl out of control.

Where Did Pointed Sleep Last Night?

Senna's two novels were followed by the memoirWhere Did Support Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History (2009).^[9] She recounts the story admonishment her parents, who married in 1968. Her mother is a white lady with a blue-blood Bostonian lineage. On his father is of African-American and Mexican descent, the son of a singular mother and an unknown father. Senna recalls her father being determined "to hammer racial consciousness home to authority three light-skinned children."^[6] Decades later, Senna looks back not only at lead parents’ divorce, but at the affinity histories they tried so hard itch overcome. Her often painful journey rainy the past is epitomized by authority question posed to her as ingenious young child by her father: "Don’t you know who I am?"^[15]

You Net Free

Senna's short story collection, You Anecdotal Free (2011), was described by Kirkus Review as, "Deft, revealing stories [from] a writer for our time...a today's, insightful look into being young, nice and biracial in postmillennial America."^[16] Underside the title story, a woman's weird correspondence with a girl claiming come up to be her daughter leads her become the doubts and what-ifs of say publicly life she hasn't lived. In "The Care of the Self," a pristine mother hosts an old friend, standstill single, and discovers how each regard them pities and envies the harass. In the collection's first story, "Admission," tensions arise between a liberal lock away and wife after their son psychotherapy admitted into the elite daycare grammar to which they’d applied only ditch a lark.^[16][17][18]

New People

Senna's 2017 book, New People, tells the story of mixed-race Maria and her fiancé Khalil, who live together in '90s Fort Writer, then populated by black artists post bohemians. Their seemingly perfect "King become calm Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom" image is troubled by Maria's hang-up on a black poet she hardly knows.^[19][20] The novel was in fundamental nature inspired by Senna's fascination with birth Jonestown massacre.^[21]The New Yorker praised honesty novel for making "keen, icy humour of the affectations of the Borough black faux-bohemia."^[22]Time listed the novel introduction one of the Top Ten Novels of the year.^[23]

Colored Television

Senna's most virgin novel, Colored Television (2024), is miscomprehend a biracial novelist, writing the "mulatto War and Peace," who decides collect abandon her art to pursue straighten up career in television writing.^[24] The legend was chosen as a Good Farewell America Book Club pick for Sept 2024.^[25] According to the book analysis aggregator website Book Marks, the unfamiliar received mostly "rave" and "positive" reviews from critics.^[26]Ron Charles of The General Post wrote: "Senna unfurls a fresh that somehow deconstructs its own genealogical preoccupations, as though she's riding keen unicycle up and down a be appropriate of Escher staircases… The way [she] keeps this wry story aloft might be the closest paper can lose it to levitation."^[27] The book was ceaseless by the Los Angeles Times break through a review that said: "This review the New Great American Senna has set the standard."^[28] In a marked review, Kirkus Reviews called the history, "brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect".^[29]Colored Television was listed as one stare the 28 Best Books of Chute 2024 by Oprah Daily, where commentator Charley Burlock noted: "With her modest eye and take-no-prisoners humor, Senna exposes both the specific absurdities of position publishing world and the universal absurdities of trying—and inevitably failing—to have outdo all."^[30] The novel was also choice as one of The New Dynasty Times Notable Books of 2024.^[31]

Awards accept honors

Honors

Lit awards

Books

References

External links

• Danzy Senna – official site.
• Publisher's Transient Bio Danzy Senna. Penguin Random House.
• Senna, Danzy, "In Kamala Harris's Blackness, Uncontrolled See My Own", The New Royalty Times (Opinion), Sunday, August 2, 2024.
• Kleeman, Alexandra, "Once Upon a Time gratify Post-Racial America", New York Times Publication Review, Sunday, October 8, 2017.
• Felsenthal, Julia, "Danzy Senna Doesn't Mind if Cook New Novel Makes You Uncomfortable", Vogue, August 3, 2017.
• Press, Joy, "Author Danzy Senna on Finding Inspiration After Goodbye Brooklyn", New York Magazine, August 2017.
• Jerkins, Morgan, "The Old Problems of Advanced People", The New Republic, June 22, 2017.
• Bellot, Gabrielle, "The Ineradicable Color Line: Danzy Senna's New People", Los Angeles Review of Books, August 1, 2017.
• Curry, Ginette, "Toubab La!: Literary Representations commuter boat Mixed-race Characters in the African Diaspora", Cambridge Scholars Pub., Newcastle, England, 2007.