Professor Honorée Jeffers

Professor Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a critic, novelist, poet, and scholar. She is the author of five books of poetry and one forthcoming novel. Her fifth book, The Age of Phillis (2020) won the NAACP Image Award for Literary Work: Poetry, and was a finalist for the George Washington Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, Oklahoma Book Award, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. In addition, The Age of Phillis was long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry and selected for “Best Poetry of 2020” by Library Journal, NPR’s “Best Books of 2020,” and the “Conference Common Read” for the academic year 2020-2021 by the Society of Early Americanists.

Among others, Professor Jeffers has won fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, United States Artists through The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress. She has been awarded two lifetime achievement notations for her creative writing, the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year, and induction into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. 

Professor Jeffers is Critic at Large for The Kenyon Review and has taught at the University of Oklahoma since 2002.