Danzy Senna
{{Short description|American writer (born 1970)}}
{{use mdy dates|date=November 2024}}
{{Infobox writer
| name = Danzy Senna
| image = Author Senna.webp
| caption =
| birth_date = {{Birth year and age|1970}}
| birth_place = Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
| death_date =
| death_place =
| 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
| subject =
| movement =
| signature =
| footnotes =
| parents = Fanny Howe and Carl Senna
| spouse = Percival Everett
| children = 2
| notable_works = Caucasia (1998)
| awards = Dos Passos Prize (2017)
| employer = University of Southern California
| website = {{URL|www.danzysenna.com}}
}}
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, including Caucasia (1998), Symptomatic (2003), New People (2017), and most recently Colored Television (2024). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vogue, and The New York Times.{{Cite web|title=Bringing Down Bébé: How One Mother Mistakenly Hoped a Year in Paris Would Transform Her Sons|url =https://www.vogue.com/article/bringing-down-bebe-how-one-mother-mistakenly-hoped-a-year-in-paris-would-transform-her-sons|website =Vogue|first=Danzy|last=Senna|date=November 11, 2013|access-date = 2015-11-20|language = en-US}}{{Cite magazine|title = 'Oreo' by Fran Ross Is an Overlooked Classic About Race|url = http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-overlooked-classic-about-the-comedy-of-race|magazine = The New Yorker|first=Danzy|last=Senna|date=May 7, 2015|access-date = 2015-11-20}} She is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.{{Cite web|url=http://dornsife.usc.edu/cwphd/danzy-senna/|title=Danzy Senna > Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences|website=dornsife.usc.edu|language=en|access-date=2018-03-03}}
Early life and education
Danzy Senna was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, the middle child of three.{{Cite news|url=http://archive.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2009/06/01/where_did_you_sleep_last_night_delves_into_family_secrets/|title=Investigating family secrets|last=Graham|first=Renée|work=Boston.com|date=June 1, 2009|access-date=2022-01-06}} Her parents came from markedly different backgrounds. Her mother is poet and novelist Fanny Howe, who is white and has deep Boston roots. Her maternal grandfather was Mark DeWolfe Howe, who taught at his alma mater, Harvard Law School. He was married to Mary Manning, an 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 Press, teaching at Tufts University. He edited The Fallacy of IQ, (1973) a scholarly work on racial bias and standardized testing, and is the author of The Black Press and the Struggle for Civil Rights (1993). He is the son of a Black jazz piano player and a Mexican boxer.{{Cite news|url=http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/danzy-senna-on-new-people-and-leaving-brooklyn.html|title=Author Danzy Senna on Finding Inspiration After Leaving Brooklyn|last=Press|first=Joy|work=Vulture|date=July 27, 2017|access-date=2018-03-03|language=en}}{{Cite news |last=Skurnick |first=Lizzie |title=In Interracial Family's Story, A Nation's Past |work=NPR |url=https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105465765|date=June 19, 2009|access-date=2022-01-06}}{{Cite magazine|url=https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/danzy-sennas-new-black-woman|title=Danzy Senna's New Black Woman|last=Félix|first=Doreen St|author-link=Doreen St. Félix|date=2017-08-07|magazine=The New Yorker|access-date=2018-03-03|language=en|issn=0028-792X}} Born in Louisiana, he spent a portion of his childhood in Montgomery, Alabama and was 10 years old when his mother moved to Boston with him and his sibling where they lived in a Roxbury housing project.
Senna's parents married in 1968, the year after interracial marriage became legal. Senna was born in 1970.{{Cite web |date=2018-06-15 |title=Danzy Senna's darkly comic take on racial identity |url=https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/danzy-senna-s-darkly-comic-take-on-racial-identity-1.4707804 |website=CBC Radio|interviewer=Eleanor Wachtel}} The couple divorced in 1976.{{Cite news |last=Kaplan |first=Erin Aubry |date=2009-06-21 |title='Where Did You Sleep Last Night?' by Danzy Senna |language=en-US |work=Los Angeles Times |url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-jun-21-ca-danzy-senna21-story.html |access-date=2022-01-06 |issn=0458-3035}} 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 attended Boston Public Schools. She also attended classes at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, a school for Black children in Roxbury. She and her sister were bussed during the racial desegregation rulings of the 1970s and are alumni of METCO, the voluntary racial integration program formed to enroll inner-city Black children in suburban neighborhoods around Boston. Senna graduated from Brookline High School in 1988.{{Cite web|last=Klein|first=Sam|author2=Valentina Rojas-Posada|author3=Sofia Tong|title=Alumna and author Danzy Senna visits high school|url=https://thesagonline.com/14491/news/senna-visits/|date=2015-09-29|access-date=2020-06-14|website=The Sagamore|via=mixedracestudies.org}}
Senna earned her BA degree in American Studies from Stanford University. She wrote her honors thesis on the works of writers Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, and William Faulkner. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, where she wrote her first novel, Caucasia (1998). It has won multiple awards and become required reading for many college courses.{{Cite news |last=Shea |first=Lisa |date=2017-08-03 |title='New People' is a '90s Novel of Love, Identity, and Privilege |url=https://www.elle.com/culture/books/a46309/danzy-senna-new-people-review/ |access-date=2018-03-03 |work=ELLE |language=en-US}}
She returned east after graduate school and lived in Brooklyn, New York, for many years. She has said that the atmosphere there inspired some of her later writing for New 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 novelist Percival Everett. They have two children and live near Los Angeles.{{Cite magazine|url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/percival-everett-profile |title=Percival Everett Can't Say What His Novels Mean |magazine=The New Yorker |date=11 March 2024 |last1=Binyam |first1=Maya }}
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.{{Cite web |title=Danzy Senna - Caucasia |url=http://danzysenna.com/Caucasia.html |access-date=2015-08-11 |website=danzysenna.com}} The novel received the Book of the Month Club's Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and won the Alex Award from the American Library Association.{{Cite web |url=https://www.pbs.org/mattersofrace/lm_bios.shtml#senna |title=Matters of Race: Writer bibliographies |author=PBS Program Club |year=2003 |publisher=PBS |work=Pbs.org |access-date=14 April 2012}} It was also longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and 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 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 the memoir Where 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 a blue-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?"{{Cite news |title=Sunday Book Review: Searching for Father |author=Matthews, David |author-link=David Matthews (author) |newspaper=The New York Times |date=6 August 2009|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/books/review/Matthews-t.html?_r=1 |access-date=14 April 2012}}
=''You Are Free''=
Senna's short-story collection, You Are Free (2011), was described by Kirkus Reviews as, "Deft, revealing stories [from] a writer for our time...a fresh, insightful look into being young, smart and biracial in postmillennial America."{{Cite magazine |last1=Smith |first1=Zadie |author-link=Zadie Smith |date=September 2011 |title=New Books: You Are Free |magazine=Harper's |publisher=Harper's Foundation |volume=323 |issue=1,936 |pages=73–76 |url=http://www.harpers.org/subjects/YouAreFreeBook |access-date=31 May 2012}}{{subscription required}}{{Cite web |date=March 2, 2011 |title=You Are Free |url=https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/danzy-senna/you-are-free/ |access-date=March 31, 2025 |website=Kirkus Reviews}} 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.{{Cite news|title = Book Review - You Are Free - By Danzy Senna|url = https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/books/review/book-review-you-are-free-by-danzy-senna.html|newspaper = The New York Times|date = 2011-05-06|access-date = 2015-11-20|issn = 0362-4331|first = Polly|last = Rosenwaike}}{{Cite web|title = The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction {{!}} W. W. Norton & Company|url = http://books.wwnorton.com/books/webad.aspx?id=4294986925|access-date = 2015-11-20|first = Richard|last = Bausch}}
=''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 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 local black poet she barely knows.{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/books/review-new-people-danzy-senna.html|title='New People' Riffs on Race and Love, With a Twist|newspaper=The New York Times |date=15 August 2017 |access-date=2018-03-03 |last1=Sehgal |first1=Parul }}{{Cite news|url=https://www.npr.org/2017/08/05/541632183/new-people-author-danzy-senna-loves-the-troublesome-characters|title='New People' Author Danzy Senna Loves The Troublesome Characters|work=NPR.org|first=Scott|last=Simon|date=August 5, 2017|access-date=2018-03-03|language=en}} The novel was in part inspired by Senna's fascination with the Jonestown massacre.{{Cite news|url=https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/08/29/in-her-manic-new-novel-danzy-senna-offers-an-antihero-for-the-times/|title=In Her Manic New Novel, Danzy Senna Offers an Antihero for the Times|first=Alana |last=Mohamed|date=August 29, 2017|access-date=2018-03-03}} The New Yorker praised the novel for making "keen, icy farce of the affectations of the Brooklyn black faux-bohemia."{{Cite magazine|url=https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/danzy-sennas-new-black-woman|title=Danzy Senna's New Black Woman|last=St. Félix|first=Doreen|date=2017-08-07|magazine=The New Yorker|access-date=2018-03-03|language=en|issn=0028-792X}} Time listed the novel as one of the Top Ten Novels of the year.{{Cite magazine |title=The Top 10 Novels of 2017 |url=https://time.com/5028161/top-10-novels-2017/|first=Sarah|last=Begley|date=November 21, 2017|access-date=2022-05-20 |magazine=Time |language=en}}
=''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.{{Cite web |date=2024-09-06 |title=Danzy Senna’s 'Colored Television' |url=https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/danzy-sennas-colored-television/ |access-date=2024-09-08 |website=Los Angeles Review of Books|interviewer=Kate Wolf}} The novel was chosen as a Good Morning America Book Club pick for September 2024.{{Cite web |last=Najib |first=Shafiq |date=September 3, 2024 |title='Colored Television' by Danzy Senna is our 'GMA' Book Club pick for September |url=https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/culture/story/colored-television-danzy-senna-gma-book-club-pick-113172033 |access-date=October 7, 2024 |website=Good Morning America |language=en}} According to the book review aggregator website Book Marks, the novel received mostly "rave" and "positive" reviews from critics.{{Cite web |title=Book Marks reviews of Colored Television by Danzy Senna |url=https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/colored-television/ |access-date=2024-11-25 |website=Book Marks |language=en-US}} Ron Charles of The Washington Post wrote: "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."{{Cite web |last=Charles |first=Ron |date=September 3, 2024 |title='Colored Television' turns our racial obsessions into comedy |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/09/03/colored-television-danzy-senna/ |access-date=November 25, 2024 |website=The Washington Post}} The book was lauded by the Los Angeles Times in a review that said: "This is the New Great American Novel...Danzy Senna has set the standard."{{cite web |last1=Berry |first1=Lorraine |title=With ‘Colored Television,’ Danzy Senna gives us a laugh-out-loud cultural critique |url=https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-08-26/danzy-senna-colored-television-book-review |publisher=Los Angeles Times |access-date=31 August 2024 |date=2024-08-26}} In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called the novel, "brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect".{{Cite web |date=May 4, 2024 |title=Colored Television |url=https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/danzy-senna/colored-television/ |access-date=November 25, 2024 |website=Kirkus Reviews}} Colored Television was listed as one of the 28 Best Books of Fall 2024 by Oprah Daily, where reviewer Charley Burlock noted: "With her sharp eye and take-no-prisoners humor, Senna exposes both the specific absurdities of the publishing world and the universal absurdities of trying—and inevitably failing—to have it all."{{cite web|url=https://www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/books/g61917672/new-fall-books-2024/|title=The 28 Best Books of Fall|website=Oprah Daily|date=August 21, 2024|access-date=December 29, 2024}} The novel was also selected as one of The New York Times Notable Books of 2024,{{Cite web |last=New York Times Book Review |first=Staff |date=November 26, 2024 |title=100 Notable Books of 2024 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/26/books/notable-books.html |access-date=December 9, 2024 |website=The New York Times}} and the Globe and Mail named it as one of the best books of the year that "entertained,informed and delighted us".{{cite web|url=https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-the-globe-100-the-best-books-of-2024/|title=The Globe 100: The best books of 2024|website=The Globe and Mail|date=November 22, 2024|access-date=April 22, 2025}}
Awards and honors
= Honors =
- 2002: Whiting Award
- 2004: Fellow, New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers
- 2017: Dos Passos Prize
= Literary awards =
| class="wikitable sortable"
!Year !Title !Award !Category !Result !{{Abbr|Ref|Reference}}. |
| 1999
| rowspan="3" |Caucasia |—|| {{won}} | |
|---|
| 2000
|International Dublin Literary Award |—|| {{nom|Longlisted}} | |
| 2001
|—|| {{nom|Longlisted}} |
| 2010
|Where Did You Sleep Last Night? |Nonfiction|| {{nom|Longlisted}} | |
| 2011
| rowspan="2" |You Are Free |Fiction|| {{sho|Finalist}} | |
| 2012
|Fiction|| {{nom}} | |
| 2018
|New People |Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize |—|| {{nom|Longlisted}} |
Books
- Caucasia, 1998. Riverhead Books: New York. {{ISBN|9781573220910}}.
- Symptomatic: A Novel, 2003. Riverhead Books: New York. {{ISBN|9781573222754}}.
- Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History, 2009. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York. {{ISBN|9780374289157}}.
- You Are Free: Stories, 2011. Riverhead Books: New York. {{ISBN|9781594485077}}.
- New People, 2017. Riverhead Books: New York. {{ISBN|9781594487095}}.
- Colored Television, 2024. Riverhead Books: New York. {{ISBN|9780593544372}}.
References
{{Reflist}}
External links
- {{official website|http://www.danzysenna.com|Danzy Senna}} – official site.
- [http://www.prhspeakers.com/speaker/danzy-senna Publisher's Brief Bio Danzy Senna]. Penguin Random House.
- Senna, Danzy, [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/04/opinion/kamala-harris-biracial.html "In Kamala Harris's Blackness, I See My Own"], The New York Times (Opinion), Sunday, August 2, 2024.
- Kleeman, Alexandra, [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/books/review/danzy-senna-new-people.html "Once Upon a Time in Post-Racial America"], New York Times Book Review, Sunday, October 8, 2017.
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Senna, Danzy}}
Category:20th-century African-American women writers
Category:20th-century African-American writers
Category:20th-century American novelists
Category:20th-century American women writers
Category:21st-century African-American women writers
Category:21st-century African-American writers
Category:21st-century American novelists
Category:21st-century American women writers
Category:African-American novelists
Category:American women academics
Category:American women novelists
Category:Brookline High School alumni
Category:Novelists from Massachusetts
Category:Stanford University alumni
Category:University of California, Irvine alumni