Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis’s stunning debut novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was hailed by critics as the arrival of an incandescent literary talent. The book tells the story of the Great Migration through the eyes of a woman who moves from the South to Philadelphia and her eleven children and one grandchild—her twelve tribes. Oprah Winfrey called it “astonishing” and selected it as the second book for the Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. A New York Times bestseller, Hattie was selected as a Best Book of the Year in 2013 by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and NPR.

Her newest novel is The Unsettled, set in the racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia of the 1980s, as well as in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama. It was chosen as a Notable or Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, Oprah Daily, and Kirkus Reviews. Mathis’s nonfiction has been published in The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone.

Mathis has been the recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, and the American Academy in Berlin. She was the first Black woman to be a permanent member of the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Mathis currently teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Hunter College, and is pursuing her Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary.