Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Tuesday, April 07, 2026 @ 4:00pm

Grunin Center - Main Stage
1 College Drive, Toms River, NJ 08754

Virtual Event on Zoom

Tickets Free; Advance Registration Required

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an essayist, novelist, poet, and a student of United States’ history. Jeffers’s first novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, was an Oprah’s Book Club pick and has been included on the “Great American Novels” list of The Atlantic. Love Songs has won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Fiction, the First Novelist’s Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and the Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. Love Songs was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Fiction, the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, and the Center For Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Love Songs was longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction.

Jeffers has published five books of poetry, including The Age of Phillis, based upon fifteen years of archival research on the life and times of Phillis Wheatley Peters, a formerly enslaved person who was the first Africana woman to publish a book in the Americas. The Age of Phillis won the NAACP Image Award for Literary Work: Poetry and the Lenore Marshall Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the George Washington Prize in History and the PEN/Voelcker Award. The Age of Phillis was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and appeared on the “year’s best” lists for Library Journal and NPR.

Jeffers is Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review. She is the recipient of the USA Mellon fellowship, as well as fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Aspen Summer Words Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, MacDowell Colony, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress.

Jeffers has been recognized with two lifetime achievement notations: she has won the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, and she was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. In consideration of her scholarly research on Phillis Wheatley Peters and early African Americans, she was elected to the American Antiquarian Society, a learned organization to which fourteen U.S. presidents have been elected. Jeffers is the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Professor of English at University of Oklahoma, where she has taught since 2002. Jeffers’s seventh book Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings is forthcoming from Harper in 2025.

This event is presented in collaboration with the Zoellner Arts Center at Lehigh University and is made possible by the Ocean County College Foundation.