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
Employer	University of Southern California
Notable works	Caucasia (1998)
Notable awards	Dos Passos Prize (2017)
Spouse	Percival Everett
Children	2
Parents	Fanny Howe and Carl Senna

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. She is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Early life and education

Danzy Senna was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, the middle child of three. 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). He is the son of a Black jazz piano player and a Mexican boxer. Born in Louisiana, he was 10 years old when his mother moved to Boston with him and his siblings.

The couple married in 1968, the year after interracial marriage became 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 attended Boston Public Schools. She also attended classes at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, a school for Black children in Roxbury. Later, she was bussed to a more distant school via the city's desegregation program, METCO. She graduated from Brookline High School in 1988.

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.

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.

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 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. 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?"

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 '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 black poet she barely knows. The novel was in part inspired by Senna's fascination with the Jonestown massacre. The New Yorker praised the novel for making "keen, icy farce of the affectations of the Brooklyn black faux-bohemia." Time listed 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. According to the book review aggregator website Book Marks, the novel received mostly "rave" and "positive" reviews from critics. 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." 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." In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called the novel, "brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect".

Awards and honors

Honors

• 2002: Whiting Award
• 2004: Fellow, New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers
• 2017: Dos Passos Prize

Lit awards

• Book of the Month Award for First Fiction (Caucasia)
• 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. 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.

External links

• Danzy Senna – official site.
• Publisher's Brief Bio Danzy Senna. Penguin Random House.
• Senna, Danzy, "In Kamala Harris's Blackness, I See My Own", The 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.
• 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.