Danzy Senna

Novelist
Author of the Bestseller Caucasia

“Senna's dynamic storytelling illuminates personal revelations that are anything but black and white.” —Entertainment Weekly

Danzy Senna's debut novel, Caucasia, the story of two biracial sisters growing up in racially charged Boston during the 1970s, became an instant national bestseller. It was the winner of the BOMC Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and of an Alex Award from the American Library Association. It was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, one of Glamour's three best books of the year by a new writer, one of School Library Journal's Best Adult Books of the Year for Young Adults, and a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It was also a book club selection of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer and the Contra Costa Times. Caucasia examined the politics of race with rare honesty and clarity. The LA Times called Caucasia as compelling as any you are likely to encounter, and a book that explores both the centrality and the lunacy of racial identity in America. It sparked a newfound focus on biracial cultures in America, a part of our population that does not fit into any clean category.

Senna's second novel Symptomatic (Riverhead Books), is a psychologically astute novel that continues to examine the complicated topic of race. In Symptomatic, her narrator is a biracial young woman often mistaken for white; she develops a friendship with an older, similarly mixed-race woman that begins as an antidote to loneliness and alienation, but gradually grows into something both complicated and frightening. Symptomatic is a psychological thriller rooted in the very extremes she avoids in Caucasia. Elle Magazine writes, “Symptomatic proves the raves [for Caucasia] were right on target...Senna throws everything into her literary stew–ambition, love, obsession, jealousy, and race.” Danzy Senna's newest book is the memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History (2009).

In addition to fiction, Senna also writes essays on issues of race, identity, and gender. She has also written extensively on the frequent experience of being mistaken for white, and how it’s led to an uncomfortable exposure of prejudices and intolerance in those around her. She states, "I understand the world through intimate stories. When I think about the damage of racism on our history, I am interested in the way it affects our psyches, the damage it has had on our families and the legacies of trauma that are passed down through the genes." She lives in LA.

About WHERE DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT: A PERSONAL HISTORY (2009)
When Danzy Senna's parents got married in 1968, they seemed poised to defy history. A white woman with a blue-blood Bostonian lineage and a black man raised by a struggling single mother, these two beautiful young American writers were boldly challenging long-held racial biases. When their marriage violently disintegrated eight years later, it was all the more heartrending given the hopeful symbolism of their union. Decades later, Senna looks back at her parents' divorce and their wildly opposing backgrounds: on her mother's side, a white America both illustrious and shameful and on her father's side, a no less remarkable history. Digging deeper, she reconstructs a long-buried family mystery that illuminates her own childhood, her enigmatic father, the power and failure of her parents' union, and finally, the forces of history.