| I always identified as black.
That was, I think, the only choice for me. The other choice wasn’t
psychologically healthy for me, because my whole family didn’t have
that option. So I think black was my identity, and in many ways still
is, though I think of black and mixed as related in a complicated way.
I think of myself as mixed, and I think of myself as part of a long
history of African-American writers, so I don’t see them as so distinct
as people do these days.
--Danzy Senna
Biography-Criticism
Danzy Senna was born in 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts to Fanny Howe (a
poet) and Carl Senna (a writer and activist). The racial
battleground of 1970s Boston, a place her mother described as the worst
place to raise biracial children, served as the backdrop of her
childhood.
Senna graduated with honors from Stanford
University in 1992 and received an MFA from the University of
California at Irvine in 1996. She worked as a writer and
researcher for several major magazines before publishing her first
novel, Caucasia, in 1999. The novel follows the life of Birdie
Lee, a young biracial girl whose racially indeterminate features serve
as a racial Rorschach for those around her. Widely praised for
its avoidance of the usual extremes associated with the depiction of
racial themes and for going beyond the "tragic mulatto" stereotype,
Caucasia was a success with readers and critics alike. The book
won Book of the Month Club's Stephen Crane First Fiction Award and
Senna received the Whiting Award in 2002.
Feeling the pressures of success, Senna stopped
writing for two years after the publication of Caucasia. Her
second novel, Symptomatic, a psychological thriller rooted in the very
extremes she avoids in Caucasia, was published in 2004. She
is currently at work on a non-fiction memoir of her mysterious
grandmother.
In addition to fiction, Senna writes often on
issues of race, identity, and gender. She currently holds the
Jenks' Chair of Contemporary American Letters at the College of the
Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.
Selected Bibliography
Works by the Author
Caucasia, 1999
Symptomatic, 2004
"The Mulatto Millennium" (published in Half+Half), 1998
"To Be Real" (published in To Be Real), 1995
Works about the Author
Boudreau, Brenda. "Letting the Body Speak: 'Becoming' White in Caucasia."
Modern Language Studies
(2002) 32.1: 59-70.
Hunter, Michele. "Revisiting the Third
Space: Reading Danzy Senna's Caucasia." Literature and
Racial Ambiguity. Eds. Teresa Hubel and Neil Brooks.
Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2002. 297-316
Milian Arias, Claudia M. "An Interview with
Danzy Senna." Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African
Arts and Letters (2002) 25.2: 447-52.
Related Links
http://www.penguinputnam.com/static/rguides/us/caucasia.html
Caucasia Reading Guide
http://www.africana.com/articles/qa/bk20040706danzy.asp
The Africana Q&A
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