Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of Heads of the Colored People, which won the PEN Open Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Award for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Siedenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her collection was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Award, and several other prizes, including an NAACP Image Award. She is also the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award.
She earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. With dark humor and covering topics from identity to chronic illness, her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, New York Magazine’s “The Cut,” The Root, The White Review, Ploughshares,400 Souls: A Community History of African America 1619-2019, and The 1619 Project, among other publications. In addition to a novel under contract with Scribner, she has new writing forthcoming in Fourteen Days: A Community Gathering, edited by Margaret Atwood.
She is currently the Richards Family Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Cornell University, teaching both in the MFA and undergrad programs.
About the Creative Writing Lectures Series
The Creative Writing Lecture Series brings distinguished writers to Columbia for original talks on craft. Recent guests have included John Keene, Sarah Manguso, Lynne Tillman, and Carmen Maria Machado.
