Our guest is the poet and fiction writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who teaches creative writing and literature at OU. She joins us to talk about her new book, "The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois," which is a very well-regarded debut novel. As was noted of this work in a starred review in Publishers Weekly: "A staggering and ambitious saga exploring African American history. Ailey Pearl Garfield, the youngest daughter of Geoff Garfield, a light-skinned Washington, D.C., physician, and Belle Driskell Garfield, a Southern school teacher, reckons with ancestral trauma while growing up in the 1980s and '90s. Throughout, historical sketches (or 'songs') link Ailey to her ancestors: Creeks, enslaved Africans, and early Scot slave owners. Ailey follows in the footsteps of her parents, attending the southern HBCU where they met and married as undergraduates before moving north to the 'City,' where Geoff attended medical school at Mecca University (a thinly veiled Howard). W.E.B. Du Bois's theories emerge in epigraphs throughout and are sagaciously reflected in the plot, as the accounts of Ailey's college life correspond to the 'talented tenth.' Later, tragedy unfolds as Lydia, Ailey's oldest sister who is haunted by childhood sexual abuse, succumbs to crack addiction. The multigenerational story bursts open when Ailey unearths some unknown family history during her graduate studies, as well as secrets of the Black female founder of her family's alma mater. Themes of family, class, higher education, feminism, and colorism yield many rich layers. Readers will be floored."
"The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Novel"
