Overview
Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of the story collection Heads of the Colored People, which won the 2019 PEN Open Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, The Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award. It was also long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review Daily, Dissent, The Root, Buzzfeed Books, The White Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, and other publications. She earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and currently serves as the Richards Family Assistant Professor at Cornell University.
