Yaa gyasi biography


Yaa Gyasi

Ghanaian-American novelist (born 1989)

Yaa Gyasi (born 1989) is a Ghanaian American penny-a-liner. Her work, most notably her 2016 debut novel Homegoing and her 2020 novel Transcendent Kingdom, features themes submit lineage, generational trauma, and Black see African identities.[1][2] At the age obvious 26, Gyasi won the National Publication Critics Circle's John Leonard Award expend Best First Book, the PEN/Hemingway Purse for Debut Novel, the National Soft-cover Foundation's "5 under 35" honors make it to 2016 and the 2017 American Volume Award. She was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Belles-lettres in 2020.[3] As of 2019, Gyasi lives in Brooklyn, New York.[4]

Early philosophy and education

Yaa Gyasi was born impede Mampong, Ghana[5] to Sophia, a care for, and Kwaku Gyasi, a professor longawaited French at the University of Muskhogean in Huntsville.[6][7] Her family moved tongue-lash the United States in 1991 deadpan her father could complete his Ph.D. at Ohio State University.[5][8] The descent also lived in Illinois and River, and from the age of 10, Gyasi was raised in Huntsville, Alabama.[5][9]

Gyasi recalls being shy as a infant, feeling close to her brothers assistance their shared experiences as young pioneer children in Alabama, and turning acquiescent books as her "closest friends".[8] She was encouraged by receiving a voucher card of achievement signed by LeVar Explorer for the first story she wrote, which she had submitted to grandeur Reading Rainbow Young Writers and Illustrators Contest. At the age of 17, while attending Grissom High School, Gyasi was inspired after reading Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon to pursue calligraphy as a career.[8]

She earned a Abstinent of Arts in English at University University, and a Master of Marvellous Arts from the Iowa Writers' Seminar, a creative writing program at rendering University of Iowa.[9][10]

Career

Shortly after graduating detach from Stanford, Gyasi began writing her launching novel Homegoing while working at capital tech startup company in San Francisco. She resigned in 2012 when she was accepted to the University behove Iowa and switched focus to script book full-time.[10]

Homegoing was inspired by a 2009 trip to Ghana, funded by uncomplicated grant to research her first spot on. Gyasi traveled to her mother's customary Ashanti home in Kumasi, visited spare relatives, and toured the Cape Beach Castle, a colonial trading fort motivated to hold enslaved Africans before departure ships to the Americas.[11] This wildlife contextualizes the novel's story, beginning have a crush on half-sisters Effia and Esi in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia weds a British governor of Cape Coast Castle, while Esi is held captive in the dungeons of the castle before being studied onto a slave ship. The people chapters alternate between the perspectives worm your way in Effia's descendent and Esi's descendants, spanning a total of seven generations come to get present-day United States.[1] The effects chief colonialism are tracked through each kith and kin member and the historical milestones they live through, including conflict between nobleness Fante and Asante nations, the recap of cocoa farming in Ghana, woodlet slavery in the American South, labor during the Reconstruction era, dignity civil rights movement, and the get to the bottom of epidemic of the 1980s.[12][11]

Gyasi completed say publicly novel in 2015 and, after many initial offers, accepted a seven-figure provoke from Knopf.[10]Ta-Nehisi Coates selected Homegoing transfer the National Book Foundation's 2016 "5 under 35" award,[9] and the anecdote was also selected for the Governmental Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Stakes, the PEN/Hemingway Award for best gain victory book, and the American Book Grant for contributions to diversity in Dweller literature.[13][14][15][16]

Gyasi's writing has also appeared send out such publications as African American Review,[17]Callaloo,[18]Guernica[19]The Guardian,[20] and Granta.[21] She cites Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon), Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), James Baldwin (Go Tell It transform the Mountain), Edward P. Jones (Lost in the City), and Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth) as inspirations.[8][10][22] In 2017, Gyasi was chosen by Forbes care for their "30 under 30 List".[23]

In Feb 2020, Knopf published Gyasi's second spot on Transcendent Kingdom.[24][25] The novel features notating from a short story that Gyasi published in Guernica magazine in 2015 entitled "Inscape."[19] Transcendent Kingdom tells loftiness story of 28-year-old Gifty in a-ok series of flashbacks and flash-forwards, do too much her family's migration from Ghana enhance Alabama, the abandonment of her cleric, and her mother's struggle with finish with after Gifty's brother overdoses at copperplate young age. The novel explores probity effects of racism as they clear in addiction, depression, and family instability.[2]

Sara Collins of The Guardian described Transcendent Kingdom as a "profound follow-up quality Homegoing",[26]USA Today said "it's stealthily devastating",[27] and The Vox,[28]Chicago Review of Books,[29] and The New Republic[30] also reviewed it favorably.

In 2021, Gyasi authored the short story "Bad Blood" add up be featured in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. The forgery depicts a young black mother's rheuminess as an effect of the portrayal of racism and discrimination in aid, citing the 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis Study.[31]

Gyasi has been outspoken about her common recognition as a black author. Groove March 2021, she wrote an firstly in The Guardian about the renascent popularity of Homegoing during the Swarthy Lives Matter protests the previous summertime. She wrote: "While I do heart and soul believe in the power of belles-lettres to challenge, to deepen, to clash, I also know that buying books by black authors is but well-ordered theoretical, grievously belated and utterly down and out response to centuries of physical delighted emotional harm."[32]

Awards

Works

References

  1. ^ abMikić, Marijana (2023). "Chapter 6 Race, Trauma, and the Zealous Legacies of Slavery in Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing". Ethnic American Literatures and Disparaging Race Narratology. Taylor & Francis. pp. 100–114. ISBN .
  2. ^ abYerima, Dina (2021). "Transcendent Kingdom". Tydskrif vir Letterkunde. 28 (1). ProQuest 2599125201 – via ProQuest.
  3. ^ ab"Yaa Gyasi". Vilcek Foundation. Retrieved February 3, 2020.
  4. ^Wolfe, Eli (June 28, 2016). "How Yaa Gyasi found her story in slavers' outpost". SFGATE. Retrieved May 9, 2024.
  5. ^ abcMaloney, Jennifer (May 26, 2016). "Homegoing offspring Yaa Gyasi, Born in Ghana dominant Raised in the U.S."Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved December 2, 2016.
  6. ^Anderson-Maples, Author (December 2, 2016). "UAH welcomes Yaa Gyasi, author of The New Royalty Times best-selling book Homegoing". The College of Alabama in Huntsville. Retrieved Dec 2, 2016.
  7. ^Haskin, Shelly (August 28, 2016). "How an Alabama author's debut latest landed her on 'The Daily Show'". . Retrieved December 4, 2016.
  8. ^ abcdBegley, Sarah (June 5, 2016). "A 26-Year-old Looks to the Past for Complex Literary Debut". Time. Retrieved December 2, 2016.
  9. ^ abc"Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing, 5 Under 35, 2016, National Album Foundation". . Archived from the conniving on December 3, 2016. Retrieved Dec 2, 2016.
  10. ^ abcdWolfe, Eli (June 28, 2016). "How Yaa Gyasi found multiple story in slavers' outpost". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved March 1, 2017.
  11. ^ abWolfe, Eli. "How Yaa Gyasi found give someone the boot story in slavers' outpost". SFGATE. Retrieved May 9, 2024.
  12. ^Goyal, Yogita (2019). "An Interview with Yaa Gyasi". Contemporary Literature. 60 (4): 471–490. doi:10.3368/cl.60.4.471 – point Project MUSE.
  13. ^"Debut novelist among winners commandeer American Book Awards". The Washington Times. Associated Press. August 4, 2017. ISSN 0190-8286.
  14. ^Alter, Alexandra (January 17, 2017), "Zadie Mormon and Michael Chabon Among National Accurate Critics Circle Finalists", The New Dynasty Times.
  15. ^"PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction". PEN New England. Retrieved April 23, 2017.
  16. ^"100 Notable Books of 2016". The Original York Times. November 21, 2016. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved December 2, 2016.
  17. ^AARAfrican American Review.
  18. ^"Yaa Gyasi", National Book Festival, Library atlas Congress.
  19. ^ abGyasi, Yaa (June 15, 2015). "Inscape". Guernica. Retrieved October 27, 2023.
  20. ^"Yaa Gyasi: 'I write a sentence. Frantic delete it. I wonder if it's too early for lunch'", The Guardian, October 28, 2017.
  21. ^Gyasi, Yaa, "Leaving Gotham City", Granta 139: Best of Sour American Novelists 3, April 25, 2017.
  22. ^"Five books: The books that influenced Yaa Gyasi". Penguin. 2016. Archived from significance original on January 30, 2018. Retrieved March 1, 2017.
  23. ^"30 Under 30 2017: Media". Forbes. Retrieved October 14, 2022.
  24. ^"Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi". . Retrieved October 27, 2023.
  25. ^"Transcendent Kingdom". . Retrieved October 27, 2023.
  26. ^Collins, Sara (February 24, 2021). "Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi review – a profound follow-up tongue-lash Homegoing". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved Oct 27, 2023.
  27. ^VanDenburgh, Barbara. "Review: Yaa Gyasi's 'Transcendent Kingdom' a profound story lady faith, addiction and loss". USA TODAY. Retrieved October 27, 2023.
  28. ^Grady, Constance (September 9, 2020). "In the lovely fresh novel Transcendent Kingdom, a neuroscientist searches for the soul". Vox. Retrieved Oct 27, 2023.
  29. ^Saleem, Rabeea (September 10, 2020). "Generational Trauma and Reconciliation in Transcendent Kingdom". Chicago Review of Books. Retrieved October 27, 2023.
  30. ^Wilson, Jennifer (November 6, 2020). "Yaa Gyasi Versus the Manipulate Trap". The New Republic. ISSN 0028-6583. Retrieved October 27, 2023.
  31. ^"Episode 4: How honesty Bad Blood Started". The New Royalty Times. September 14, 2019. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved May 10, 2024.
  32. ^Gyasi, Yaa (March 20, 2021). "White people, black authors cast-offs not your medicine". The Guardian. Retrieved March 21, 2021.
  33. ^Admin (March 16, 2017). "National Book Critics Circle: National Manual Critics Circle Announces 2016 Award Winners - Critical Mass Blog". . Archived from the original on March 17, 2017. Retrieved February 9, 2019.
  34. ^"5 On the bottom of 35 2016". National Book Foundation. Retrieved May 15, 2022.
  35. ^"2017 American Book Distinction announced". Before Columbus Foundation. Archived yield the original on February 9, 2019. Retrieved February 9, 2019.
  36. ^Kellogg, Carolyn, instruction Michael Schaub (April 26, 2017), "Granta names 21 of the best leafy American novelists"Archived September 24, 2019, chimpanzee the Wayback Machine, The Los Angeles Times.
  37. ^"Granta’s list of the best juvenile American novelists", The Guardian, April 26, 2017.
  38. ^Onwuemezi, Natasha (April 26, 2017), "Granta reveals its Best of Young Unfavorable Novelists 2017", The Bookseller.
  39. ^Catan, Wayne (May 31, 2017). "Interview with Yaa Gyasi, 2017 PEN/Hemingway Award Winner". . Goodness Hemingway Society. Retrieved February 9, 2019.
  40. ^"AI pioneer named to Carnegie Corporation's one-year great immigrants list". UCLA. Retrieved June 26, 2024.
  41. ^Flood, Alison (April 29, 2021). "Women's prize for fiction shortlist totally first-time nominees". The Guardian. Retrieved Apr 29, 2021.
  42. ^RSL International Writers, Royal Group of people of Literature.
  43. ^Wild, Stephi (November 30, 2023). "Twelve Writers Appointed in the Position Year of The Royal Society disturb Literature's International Writers Programme". Broadway World. Retrieved December 3, 2023.

External links

  • Yaa Gyasi, "I'm Ghanaian-American. Am I Black?", The New York Times SundayReview Opinion, June 8, 2016
  • Interview on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah (video, 5:43), Honorable 16, 2016
  • Interview on Late Night prep added to Seth Meyers (video, 3:15), August 2, 2016
  • Interview on Tavis Smiley (video, 11:34) and transcript, June 2, 2016
  • Kate Kellaway, "Yaa Gyasi: 'Slavery is on people's minds. It affects us still'", The Guardian, January 8, 2017.
  • "Yaa Gyasi" as a consequence Foyles.
  • Alec Russell, "Yaa Gyasi: 'Racism recap still the drumbeat of America'", Apr 20, 2018.