Ayana mathis age
Hunter Faculty Member Keeps the Prestigious Prizes Coming
She’s the toast of two continents!
A distinguished lecturer in Hunter College’s Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts Program was named the inaugural winner of a literary award named for a late author.
Ayana Mathis won the $10, Gabe Hudson Award for her novel The Unsettled (Alfred A. Knopf, ).
The award comes on the heels of Mathis’s selection as a Berlin Prize winner; she is spending the fall semester lecturing at the American Academy in Berlin.
The Gabe Hudson Award was established in Hudson’s memory by McSweeney’s magazine, where he worked as an editor. Hudson, who died last year at age 52, published two books and championed other writers.
The Unsettled also was a finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation's Legacy Award for general fiction.
The Unsettled, Mathis’s second novel, follows three generations of a Black family as they confront tumultuous times and personal misfortunes in the 20th century North and South. Throughout the novel, Mathis “skillfully and subtly drops allusions to historical events, sending the reader on a kind of intellectual treasure hunt,” according to the New York Times.
It is no exaggeration to say that Mathis is the toast of the Times. Her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, ), was a Times Bestseller, second selection for Oprah’s Book Club , a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of , and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston–Wright Foundation’s Legacy Award. Mathis’s nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica, and Glamour. Her work has been supported by The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She was also a – American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis received her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went “Hattie came of age in a state and time when a white man could take anything he wanted from a black man, including his life. Like many others, she fled north with her mother and sister, seeking safety and the chance for a better life. Hattie is just 15 when life teaches her these lessons, and 16 when her twin babies die in her arms. Hattie?s story is told in alternating chapters through the children she raised, the trials they gave her, and her perseverance every time life knocked her down. This is the story of a woman's strength and determination and the story of a nation as it wrestles with the oppression of blacks and their striving to achieve equality in a world that judged them solely by the color of their skin.” Ayana Mathis spent her early years waiting tables and fact-checking magazines while crafting stories in her spare time, dreaming of becoming a writer since age 8. Now, more than a decade after Oprah Winfrey catapulted her first novel to bestseller status, the Philadelphia native has released "The Unsettled" (Random House), a sweeping narrative that's drawing critical acclaim. "The Unsettled" chronicles three generations of a family grappling with the legacy of Bonaparte, a 1,acre independent Black town in Alabama. The story follows Bonaparte's descendants who fled North, including its favorite daughter, Ava, and her son, Toussaint, as they navigate the harsh landscape of s Philadelphia, perpetually on the edge of homelessness. The New York Times called the book "Poignant, heartbreaking Mathis skillfully and subtly drops allusions to historical events, sending the reader on a kind of intellectual treasure hunt." Mathis's prose sparkles with vivid metaphors: "Her face was clenched like a fist," "A thought leapt across her brain like a cat over a wall," "Toussaint yelped like he was being kicked in his dreams," and "He was always standing in a corner while the party slowly tilted toward him like planets around a sun." This masterful writing style first caught Winfrey's attention with Mathis's debut novel, "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie" (Knopf, ). The book, which opens in with Hattie Shepherd's journey from Georgia to Philadelphia, follows the lives of her 11 children and one grandchild as they confront racism and poverty. It won NPR's Best Book of Award and garnered several major literary award nominations. "Oprah completely changed my life," Mathis said. "That first book did not take that long to write, but the great reception had hidden costs. It was the greatest blessing of my life, but there is such a thing as the sophomore slump. It is hard to find privacy, and the next things you write will always be comp In Ayana Mathis&#;s first novel,The Twelve Tribes of Hattie(Knopf Doubleday, ), a young woman moves to Philadelphia after her father is murdered in Jim Crow-era Georgia. There, she has twins, but they succumb to pneumonia in infancy. The twelve tribes of the title are her dead twins, her nine other children, and one grandchild; the novel itself is a biblically inflected family saga and a powerfully moving re-creation of a dark time in American history. A masterful debut, it was a New York Times Notable Book and an Oprah selection. It&#;s also an excellent introduction to a major new voice in American fiction. Mathis is a professor of creative writing and a frequent contributor to The New York Times &#; you can read her thoughts on the most terrifying book she&#;s read, which subjects are underrepresented in contemporary fiction, the duties of historical fiction, and more. In Michiko Kakutani&#;s words, &#;Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters’ stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison’s writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own &#; both lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral, and capable of giving the reader nearly complete access to her characters’ minds and hearts.&#; Name: Ayana Mathis Age: 42 Where are you from? Philadelphia What is your occupation? Writer & professor Title of most recent work: The Twelve Tribes of Hattie What are you working on now? Err&#; secret? What&#;s your earliest memory of literature? Watching Pride and Prejudice on Masterpiece Theatre and pretending to invite Mr. Darcy to tea (wearing one of my mother&#;s dresses with my dog Shane cast in the role of Mr. Darcy). What is your petite madeleine? Funnel cake from the 4H fair that happened every August, usually on my birthday, just across the road from my grandparents&#; house in N The Twelve Tribes of Hattie: Oprah&#;s Book Club (Vintage Contemporaries) (Paperback)
January Indie Next List
— Deon Stonehouse, Sunriver Books, Sunriver, OR Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB SELECTION • "A remarkable page-turner of a novel." —Chicago Tribune
In , fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd, swept up by the tides of the Great Migration, flees Georgia and heads north. This "brutal, illuminating version of the twentieth century African-American experience belongs alongside those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston" (Newsday).
Full of hope, Hattie settles in Philadelphia to build a better life. Instead she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment, and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins are lost to an illness that a few pennies could have prevented.
Hattie gives birth to nine more children, whom she raises with grit, mettle, and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them to meet a world that will not be kind. Their lives, captured here in twelve luminous threads, tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage Oprah pick led Mt. Airy writer to literary success
Seriously Questioning&#; Ayana Mathis