Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Nafissa Thompson-Spires (born 1983) is an African-American writer. Her first book, Heads of the Colored People, won the Los Angeles Times Art Sidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the PEN Open Book Award, and a Hurston/Wright Award for fiction

Biography

She was born in San Diego, California, in 1983. She earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in creative writing from University of Illinois and Vanderbilt University.

Her first book, Heads of the Colored People, won the Los Angeles Times Art Sidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the PEN Open Book Award, and a Hurston/Wright Award for fiction, among other prizes. Heads of the Colored People has been translated into Italian, Turkish, and Portuguese.

She also won a 2019 Whiting Award.[1] She was long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award.[2]

Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in New York Magazine's “The Cut,” “The Root,” “The Paris Review.,[3] “The White Review,” “Ploughshares,” and many other places. Her short piece, “Unbought, Unbossed, Unbothered,” is included in The 1619 Project.

In 2020, she served as a judge for PEN America.[4]

She currently teaches at Cornell University as the Richards Family Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, where she teaches fiction and television studies.[5]

In October of 2018, she appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers, alongside David Cross and Wanda Sykes.

Works
  • Heads of the Colored People, London: Vintage, 2019. ISBN 9781784706586 [6][7][8]

References
  1. "Nafissa Thompson-Spires". www.whiting.org. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  2. "Nafissa Thompson-Spires". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  3. "Nafissa Thompson-Spires". The Paris Review. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  4. "Meet the 2020 Literary Awards Judges". PEN America. 2019-12-11. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  5. "Nafissa Thompson-Spires | Department of Literatures in English Cornell Arts & Sciences". english.cornell.edu. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  6. "Nafissa Thompson-Spires: 'I wanted to see more stories about nerdy black people'". the Guardian. 2019-08-03. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  7. "Nafissa Thompson-Spires's 'Heads of the Colored People'". The White Review. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  8. Borrelli, Christopher. "Lauded author depicting perils of everyday black life dealing with chronic pain from endometriosis". chicagotribune.com. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
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