North Carolina poet Honoree Fanonne Jeffers’ debut fiction, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, is Oprah’s latest Book Club Pick.
(author photo by Sydney A. Foster)
Published by Harper Collins, The Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois tells the tale of Ailey Pearl Garfield who is reared in the north in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that’s made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma, as well as the whispers of women—her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and a maternal line reaching back two centuries—that urge Ailey to succeed in their stead. To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family’s past. And so she must confront the song of America, adding to it her own voice.
