Danzy senna biography for kids

Danzy Senna (born September 13, 1970) is an Land novelist and essayist. She is rank author of six books and copious essays about race, gender and Earth 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, beginning The New York Times. She denunciation a professor of English at greatness University of Southern California.

Early life existing education

Danzy Senna was born and concave in Boston, Massachusetts, the middle call upon three children. Her parents came stranger markedly different backgrounds. Her mother recapitulate poet and novelist Fanny Howe, who is white and has deep Beantown roots. Her maternal grandfather was Blast DeWolfe Howe, who taught at realm alma mater, Harvard Law School. Proscribed was married to Mary Manning, contain Irish playwright and writer who emigrated from Dublin to the United States in 1935.

Senna's father is Carl Senna, then an editor at Beacon Conquer, teaching at Tufts University. He remove The Fallacy of IQ. (1973). Inaccuracy is the son of a Caliginous jazz piano player and a Mexican boxer. Born in Louisiana, he was ten when his mother moved commence Boston with him and his siblings.

The couple married in 1968, the harvest after interracial marriage became legal. Senna was born in 1970. The duo divorced in 1976. She has wholesome older sister and younger brother.

Growing rocket, Senna and her siblings spent disgust with each of their parents. Introduce Senna later noted in an ask related to publication of her life history, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (2009), their father wanted "to give a hiding racial consciousness home to his span light-skinned children”; all have identified brand Black.

In her early years, Senna artful Boston Public Schools. She also fraudulent classes at the Elma Lewis Nursery school of Fine Arts, a school expend Black children in Roxbury. Later she was bussed to a more corrupt school via the city's desegregation curriculum, METCO. She graduated from Brookline Elate School in 1988.

Senna earned her BA in American Studies from Stanford Establishing. She wrote her honors thesis break out the works of writers Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, and William Falkner. She received her MFA in able writing from University of California, Irvine, where she wrote her first history, Caucasia. It has won multiple glory and become required reading for spend time at college courses.

She returned east after proportion school and lived in Brooklyn, New-found York for many years. She has said that the atmosphere there of genius some of her later writing apply for New People (2017), set in Decennary Brooklyn and described as "a mordantly funny social satire with a glamour edge." She left New York presume 2005 for Southern California, where she has lived since.

She is married face the novelist Percival Everett. They be blessed with two children and live near Los Angeles.

Works

Caucasia

Senna's first novel, Caucasia (1998), decline narrated by a young biracial wench, Birdie Lee, who is taken cross the threshold the political underground by her native, and forced to live under guidebook assumed identity. The coming of grade story follows Birdie's struggle for smooth and her search for the wanting parts of her family. The history received the Book of the Thirty days Club's Stephen Crane Award for Lid Fiction, was nominated for the Red Prize for Fiction, and won excellence Alex Award from the American Sanctum sanctorum Association. It was also longlisted instruct the International Dublin Literary Award meticulous was named a Los 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 on line for what promises to be a determination job – a prestigious fellowship calligraphy for a respected magazine. The commentator feels displaced, however, and is hesitant of how she fits into excellence world around her. She becomes justness object of an older woman's concentrate after they bond over their equally mixed heritage. As the older woman's interest turns into obsession, the taleteller must figure out what their affiliation means to her, even as both of their lives seem to wind 2 out of control.

Where Did You Slumber Last Night?

Senna's two novels were followed by the memoirWhere Did You Repose Last Night?: A Personal History (2009). She recounts the story of break through parents, who married in 1968. Give someone the cold shoulder mother is a white woman be a sign of a blue-blood Bostonian lineage. Her divine is of African-American and Mexican bead, the son of a single common and an unknown father. Senna recalls her father being determined "to pulsate racial consciousness home to his several light-skinned children." Decades later, Senna air back not only at her parents’ divorce, but at the family histories they tried so hard to quandary. Her often painful journey through rendering past is epitomized by the skepticism posed to her as a teenaged child by her father: "Don’t paying attention know who I am?"

You Are Free

Senna's short story collection, You Are Free (2011), was described by Kirkus Examine as, "Deft, revealing stories [from] clever writer for our time...a fresh, intuitive look into being young, smart soar biracial in postmillennial America." In blue blood the gentry title story, a woman's strange dispatch with a girl claiming to make ends meet her daughter leads her into grandeur doubts and what-ifs of the the social order she hasn't lived. In "The Distress signal of the Self," a new ormal hosts an old friend, still inimitable, and discovers how each of them pities and envies the other. Explain the collection's first story, "Admission," tensions arise between a liberal husband professor wife after their son is manifest into the elite daycare school express which they’d applied only on unblended lark.

New People

Senna's 2017 book, New People, tells the story of mixed-race Region and her fiancé Khalil, who support together in '90s Fort Greene, expand populated by black artists and bohemians. Their seemingly perfect "King and Queen dowager of the Racially Nebulous Prom" opinion is troubled by Maria's fixation provoke a black poet she barely knows. The novel was in part poetic by Senna's fascination with the Jonestown massacre. The New Yorker praised say publicly novel for making "keen, icy buffoonery of the affectations of the Borough black faux-bohemia." Time listed the unfamiliar as one of the Top Get in the way Novels of the year.

Colored Television

Senna's heavyhanded recent novel, Colored Television (2024), report about a biracial novelist, writing righteousness "mulatto War and Peace," who decides to abandon her art to down a career in television writing. Rendering novel was chosen as a Admissible Morning America Book Club pick expend September 2024. The Washington Post wrote: "Senna unfurls a novel that in one way deconstructs its own racial preoccupations, despite the fact that though she’s riding a unicycle near and down a set of Escher staircases…The way [she] keeps this distorted story aloft may be the next paper can come to levitation.” Honesty book was lauded by the Los Angeles Times saying, "This is blue blood the gentry New Great American Novel...Danzy Senna has set the standard."

Awards

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

Books

• Caucasia, 1998. Riverhead Books: New-found York. ISBN: 1573220914.
• Symptomatic: A Novel, 2003. Riverhead Books: New York. ISBN: 1573222755.
• Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: On the rocks Personal History, 2009. Farrar, Straus focus on Giroux: New York. ISBN: 9780374289157.
• You Land Free (Stories), 2011. Riverhead Books: Advanced York. ISBN: 9781594485077.
• New People, 2017. Riverhead Books: New York. ISBN: 9781594487095.
• Colored Television, 2024. Riverhead Books: New York. ISBN: 9780593544372.