DANZY SENNA, NOVELIST

“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 bi-racial sisters growing up in racially charged Boston during the 1970's, 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 bi-racial 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.”

In addition to fiction, Senna also writes essays on issues of race, identity, and gender. Senna 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 lives in LA.