Danzy Senna

Danzy Senna
Born	1970 (age 53–54) Boston,Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, essayist, professor
Education	Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts Brookline High School Stanford University(BA) University of California, Irvine(MFA)
Period	Contemporary
Genre	Fiction, non-fiction

Danzy Senna(born September 13, 1970) is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of six books and numerous essays about race, gender and American identity, includingCaucasia(1998),Symptomatic(2003),New People(2017), and most recentlyColored Television(2024). Her writing has appeared inThe New Yorker,The Atlantic,Vogue,andThe New York Times.She is a professor of English at theUniversity of Southern California.

Early life and education

Danzy Senna was born and raised inBoston, Massachusetts,the middle of three children.Her parents came from markedly different backgrounds. Her mother is poet and novelistFanny Howe,who is white and has deep Boston roots. Her maternal grandfather wasMark DeWolfe Howe,who taught at his alma mater,Harvard Law School.He was married toMary Manning,an Irish playwright and writer who emigrated fromDublinto the United States in 1935.

Senna's father isCarl Senna,then an editor at Beacon Press, teaching at Tufts University. He editedThe Fallacy of IQ.(1973). He is the son of aBlackjazz piano player and aMexicanboxer.Born in Louisiana, he was ten when his mother moved to Boston with him and his siblings.

The couple married in 1968, the year afterinterracial marriagebecame legal. Senna was born in 1970.The couple divorced in 1976.She has an older sister and younger brother.

Growing up, Senna and her siblings spent time with each of their parents. As Senna later noted in an interview related to publication of her memoir,Where Did You Sleep Last Night?(2009), their father wanted "to hammer racial consciousness home to his three light-skinned children”; all have identified as Black.

In her early years, Senna attendedBoston Public Schools.She also attended classes at theElma Lewis School of Fine Arts,a school for Black children inRoxbury.Later she was bussed to a more distant school via the city's desegregation program,METCO.She graduated fromBrookline High Schoolin 1988.

Senna earned herBAinAmerican StudiesfromStanford University.She wrote her honors thesis on the works of writersNella Larsen,James Weldon Johnson,andWilliam Faulkner.She received herMFAincreative writingfromUniversity of California, Irvine,where she wrote her first novel,Caucasia.It has won multiple awards and become required reading for many college courses.

She returned east after graduate school and lived inBrooklyn,New York for many years. She has said that the atmosphere there inspired some of her later writing forNew People(2017), set in 1990s Brooklyn and described as "a mordantly funny social satire with a thriller edge."She left New York in 2005 for Southern California, where she has lived since.

She is married to the novelistPercival Everett.They have two children and live near Los Angeles.

Works

Caucasia

Senna's first novel,Caucasia(1998), is narrated by a young biracial girl, Birdie Lee, who is taken into the political underground by her mother, and forced to live under an assumed identity. The coming of age story follows Birdie's struggle for identity and her search for the missing parts of her family.The novel received theBook of the Month Club'sStephen CraneAward for First Fiction, was nominated for theOrange Prize for Fiction,and won theAlex Awardfrom theAmerican Library Association.It was also longlisted for theInternational Dublin Literary Awardand was named aLos Angeles Times"Best Book of the Year".Caucasia,a national bestseller, has been translated into ten languages.

Symptomatic

Her second novel,Symptomatic(2004), is a psychological thriller narrated by an unnamed young woman who moves to New York City for what promises to be a dream job – a prestigious fellowship writing for a respected magazine. The narrator feels displaced, however, and is unsure of how she fits into the world around her. She becomes the object of an older woman's attention after they bond over their similarly mixed heritage. As the older woman's interest turns into obsession, the narrator must figure out what their relationship means to her, even as both of their lives seem to spiral out of control.

Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

Senna's two novels were followed by thememoirWhere Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History(2009).She recounts the story of her parents, who married in 1968. Her mother is a white woman with ablue-blood Bostonian lineage.Her father is of African-American and Mexican descent, the son of a single mother and an unknown father. Senna recalls her father being determined "to hammer racial consciousness home to his three light-skinned children."Decades later, Senna looks back not only at her parents’ divorce, but at the family histories they tried so hard to overcome. Her often painful journey through the past is epitomized by the question posed to her as a young child by her father: "Don’t you know who I am?"

You Are Free

Senna's short story collection,You Are Free(2011), was described by Kirkus Review as, "Deft, revealing stories [from] a writer for our time...a fresh, insightful look into being young, smart and biracial in postmillennial America."In the title story, a woman's strange correspondence with a girl claiming to be her daughter leads her into the doubts and what-ifs of the life she hasn't lived. In "The Care of the Self," a new mother hosts an old friend, still single, and discovers how each of them pities and envies the other. In the collection's first story, "Admission," tensions arise between a liberal husband and wife after their son is admitted into the elite daycare school to which they’d applied only on a lark.

New People

Senna's 2017 book,New People,tells the story of mixed-race Maria and her fiancé Khalil, who live together in '90sFort Greene,then populated by black artists and bohemians. Their seemingly perfect "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom" image is troubled by Maria's fixation on a black poet she barely knows.The novel was in part inspired by Senna's fascination with theJonestown massacre.The New Yorkerpraised the novel for making "keen, icy farce of the affectations of the Brooklyn black faux-bohemia."Timelisted the novel as one of the Top Ten Novels of the year.

Colored Television

Senna's most recent novel,Colored Television(2024), is about a biracial novelist, writing the "mulatto War and Peace," who decides to abandon her art to pursue a career in television writing.The novel was chosen as a Good Morning America Book Club pick for September 2024.The Washington Postwrote: "Senna unfurls a novel that somehow deconstructs its own racial preoccupations, as though she’s riding a unicycle up and down a set of Escher staircases…The way [she] keeps this wry story aloft may be the closest paper can come to levitation.” The book was lauded by theLos Angeles Timessaying, "This is the New Great American Novel...Danzy Senna has set the standard."

Awards

• 2017:Dos Passos Prize
• 2004: Fellow,New York Public Library'sCullman Center for Scholars and Writers
• 2002:Whiting Award
• Book of the Month Award for First Fiction (Caucasia)
• American Library Association's Alex Award (Caucasia)
• Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award (Caucasia)
• Listed as a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year (Caucasia)

Books

• Caucasia,1998.Riverhead Books:New York.ISBN1573220914.
• Symptomatic: A Novel,2003. Riverhead Books: New York.ISBN1573222755.
• Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History,2009.Farrar, Straus and Giroux:New York.ISBN9780374289157.
• You Are Free (Stories),2011. Riverhead Books: New York.ISBN9781594485077.
• New People,2017. Riverhead Books: New York.ISBN9781594487095.
• Colored Television,2024. Riverhead Books: New York.ISBN9780593544372.

External links

• Danzy Senna– official site
• Publisher's Brief Bio Danzy Senna
• Senna, Danzy,"In Kamala Harris's Blackness, I See My Own",New York Times Opinion,Sunday, August 2, 2024.
• Kleeman, Alexandra,"Once Upon a Time in Post-Racial America",New York Times Book Review,Sunday, October 8, 2017.
• Sehgal, Parul,"‘New People’ Riffs on Race and Love, With a Twist",New York Times,August 15, 2017
• St. Félix, Doreen,"Danzy Senna's New Black Woman",The New Yorker,August 7, 2017
• Felsenthal, Julia,"Danzy Senna Doesn't Mind if Her New Novel Makes You Uncomfortable",Vogue,August 3, 2017
• Press, Joy,"Author Danzy Senna on Finding Inspiration After Leaving Brooklyn",New York Magazine,August 2017
• Jerkins, Morgan,"The Old Problems of New 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 of Mixed-race Characters in the African Diaspora",Cambridge Scholars Pub.,Newcastle, England, 2007.