Professor Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, award-winning poet and 1989 graduate of Talladega College, will serve as this year’s Founders’ Day Convocation speaker on Thursday, November 4th at 10 AM in DeForest Chapel.
She is the youngest daughter of legendary Talladega professor, Dr. Trellie James Jeffers and the author of six books, including one novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, which was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club for 2021, was long-listed for the National Book Award in Fiction, and an instant New York Times bestseller.
"We are extremely grateful to have such an esteemed alum serve as this year’s speaker,” said Dr. Lisa Long, Acting President of Talladega College. “I truly admire her strong and heartfelt commitment to crafting literary works that reflect the lives and stories of African Americans.”
Jeffers’s fifth book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, is based upon fifteen years of research on the life and times of Phillis Wheatley Peters, a formerly enslaved person who was the first African American woman to publish a book. The Age of Phillis won the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Literary Work: Poetry, and was long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry.
She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, among others. In consideration of her scholarly research on Phillis Wheatley Peters, she was elected to the American Antiquarian Society, a learned organization to which fourteen U.S. Presidents have been elected.
In 2020, Jeffers was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame, which recognizes lifetime achievements. She currently serves as a Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where she has taught since 2002.
