Research Guides (LibGuides): Visiting Writers' Series LibGuide: Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi with Seth Myers
Interview from Aug. 2, 2016, season 3, episode 152, 1:27 am -1:34 am
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See also https://archive.org/details/KNTV_20160803_073700_Late_Night_With_Seth_Meyers

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INTERVIEWS

Yaa Gyasi on "Homegoing" for Chicago Humanities Festival
Born in Ghana and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, Yaa Gyasi has written a debut work that embraces her extended world in all its complexity. Tracing the descendants of two sisters torn apart in eighteenth-century Africa, Homegoing is a riveting, kaleidoscopic novel about race, history, ancestry, love, and time. Stretching from the wars of Ghana to the coal mines of the American South to twentieth-century Harlem, Gyasi’s tale captures the troubled spirit of our nation.
Wall Street Journal with Yaa Gyasi
Yaa Gyasi's debut novel, "Homegoing," sold for at least $1 million and was informed by her own journey as a Ghanaian-American. The book follows the descendants of two black half-sisters: one married to a British officer, the other sold into slavery in the U.S.
The Rumpus Interview with Yaa Gyasi
Gyasi and Abigail Bereola discuss topics beyond her debut novel Homegoing. "We talked of complicity and the multiplicity of black experiences, of process and of love."

PODCASTS

Many works by our Visiting Writers' Series authors are pulled from their normal places on the shelves and temporarily located in a special display in the Browsing Collection. This collection is located near the Information Commons service desk, next to the vending machines and newspapers.

When you look at an item's record in WorldCat Discovery, be sure to note whether the items is in the General Stacks (mostly 2nd floor) or the Browsing Collection (1st floor). If you have any questions about locating an item on the shelf, don't hesitate to ask us!

Remember - if we don't own it or our copy is currently checked out, you probably can still get a copy through PALShare or interlibrary loan! Learn more.

I'm Ghanaian-American. Am I Black? by Yaa Gyasi
"No one was happy about this move, our fourth state in our second country, but my father had found a tenure-track position at the university in Huntsville and assured us that we were there to stay. There were no black Americans, let alone West Africans, in the neighborhood. Because the Huntsville schools were, and still are, extremely segregated, and because my family lived on the white side of town, I was the sole black student in almost all of my classes."
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
"Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.
Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation."

"Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana but raised in Huntsville, Alabama, following the family's immigration to the United States. A college sophomore in 2009, Gyasi returned to her native country for the first time. She thought perhaps she would do some research for a novel about a mother and daughter. In the end, a visit to Ghana's Cape Coast Castle changed her perspective and, indeed, has changed her life. The castle, where slaves were kept waiting to be shipped to the Americas, powerfully affected her, and what was planned as a domestic novel became, over the years, a saga of eight generations looking at the legacy of slavery. Gyasi's debut novel, the 2016 Homegoing, earned the fledgling novelist an impressive seven-figure advance and high critical marks.

Speaking with Time.com contributor Cody Pickens, Gyasi noted that she started reading and writing at an early age, commenting that books were her "closest friends" as a Ghanaian youth growing up in Alabama. Gyasi added: "Very quickly for me reading and writing went hand in hand, though I know that's not true for all children who are big readers." Though she had success as an adolescent in a "Reading Rainbow" contest, she did not initially see writing as a career opportunity. "I don't think I really understood that you could choose writing as a profession for many years later. It wasn't really until I was 17, when I read Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and saw, 'Oh, someone like me, a black woman, can do this as their job and do it so well.' And so that was really a turning point. It was the beginning of me saying to people that I wanted to be a writer." After graduating from Stanford, Gyasi went on to the famed Iowa Writer's Workshop to earn an M.F.A., and then began working on the drafts of what would become Homegoing."

Source: "Yaa Gyasi." Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2017. Biography in Context. Accessed 2 June 2017.

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YAA GYASI REVIEWS AND CRITICISM

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Library Journal Book Review
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New York Times Book Review
This link will take you to the New York Times Book Review hosted on the Literature Resource Center database. It includes issues from 2001 to present. You can search within the entire publication (box at top of page) or you can select a specific year from the drop-down menu. Older issues are available via other databases - ask a librarian for help accessing these issues.

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Visiting Writers' Series LibGuide: Yaa Gyasi

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