Danzy senna biography for kids

“Is Danzy Senna Black?”

Biography of Danzy Senna

Danzy Senna is a novelist and essayist. Her work deals with issues of identity, motherhood, gender, and race.

Her mother is the poet and novelist Fanny Howe. Her father, Carl Senna, a scholar-author of The Black Press and the Struggle for Civil Rights and The Fallacy of I.Q.

Senna earned her B.A. from Stanford University and MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, where she received several creative writing awards.

Danzy Senna’s debut novel, Caucasia, has been translated into ten languages and has won multiple awards such as the Book of the Month Award for First Fiction and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Caucasia was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.

Senna lives in Los Angeles with her husband, novelist Percival Everett, and their sons.

Are you the author profiled here?Email us your official website or Let us host your primary web presence.

6 Books by Danzy Senna

American writer (born 1970)

Danzy Senna (born September 13, 1970) is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of six books and numerous essays about race, gender and American identity, including Caucasia (1998), Symptomatic (2003),New People (2017), and most recently Colored Television (2024). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker,The Atlantic,Vogue, and The New York Times. She is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Early life and education

Danzy Senna was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, the middle child of three. Her parents came from markedly different backgrounds. Her mother is poet and novelist Fanny Howe, who is white and has deep Boston roots. Her maternal grandfather was Mark DeWolfe Howe, who taught at his alma mater, Harvard Law School. He was married to Mary Manning, an Irish playwright and writer who emigrated from Dublin to the United States in 1935.

Senna's father is Carl Senna, then an editor at Beacon Press, teaching at Tufts University. He edited The Fallacy of IQ (1973) and is the author of The Black Press and the Struggle for Civil Rights (1993). He is the son of a black jazz piano player and a Mexican boxer. Born in Louisiana, he was 10 years old when his mother moved to Boston with him and his siblings.

The couple married in 1968, the year after interracial marriage became legal. Senna was born in 1970. The couple divorced in 1976. She has an older sister and younger brother.

Growing up, Senna and her siblings spent time with each of their parents. As Senna later noted in an interview related to publication of her memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (2009), their father wanted "to hammer racial consciousness home to his three light-skinned children"; all have identified as Black.

In her early

Interview

Sarah Dillard from PEN America speaks with author Danzy Senna about her novel, Colored Television

1. Colored Television centers around a writer, Jane, who is trying to complete her second novel. According to her agent, Honor, an author's second novel is "always a disappointment." What's the difference between writing your first novel vs. your second? Do you relate to Jane's struggle and her agent's advice?

I think it's always true for every writer that your debut novel stands on its own, but your second novel is always seen in relation to what came before. The second novel is where the comparisons begin, particularly if your first novel happens to be a big success. You can feel like you are being set up to fail. Add racial dynamics into this equation and there is a whole other layer of complication. Like Jane, I struggled after Caucasia with anxiety, imposter syndrome. I was, like Jane, processing the regular pressures of writing the follow up, compounded by the racial projections thrown onto me as a writer of "uncertain color." In these creative industries, the entire system is set up around a racial binary. And if the industry isn't sure what color you represent, which shelf to put you on, you are more often than not met with bewilderment. All of which is to say, I definitely drew on all these experiences when writing the ...

Full Interview

Books by this Author

Books by Danzy Senna at BookBrowse