DéLana R.A. Dameron
“My relationship to the South (always capital S) is complicated, and loaded. But there will always be reverence and love. I had to put distance between us to know how to love it, to appreciate what it gave me, to understand what it might have taken away. Only lately have I been able to articulate, or understand, that I moved to New York City in order to know how to love the South — and myself — better.”
“This novel delivers the kind of choral experience that I have savored in books as disparate as James McBride’s “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” and Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Kitteridge.” Reading “Redwood Court” feels like wandering down a street, stopping to listen to different voices, for better and for worse. At the end of that road is Mika, still striving to understand what she is made of but sensing that part of the answer is rooted in that chorus of voices.”
“Redwood Court is a beautiful and riveting novel of generational reckoning. DéLana Dameron offers with tenderness and a lyrical sensitivity, an insider’s insight into the “big love” of the abundantly rich black southern life of tribe, community, and family”
“A beautiful exploration of a family . . . deeply moving.”
“DéLana R.A. Dameron has scored us a space brimmed with memory and light, a song of migration and family that shimmers and burns across the page. Her poems trance subways and kudzu and pepper spray across a Mason Dixon trail of family and loves. Witness these epistles to beetle and moth, to river bend voices blooming in an embattled cityscape that weaves us whole.”
“What a refreshing range of vision DéLana R.A. Dameron shows in these splendid poems. Ever rich with the arresting image, ever graceful and yet refusing to look away from a suffering that calls grace into question from “the assemblies of the shattered / in Harlem to the steady inevitability of how the flesh must fail us,” these poems argue for witness as the only way of knowing, of being somehow grateful for a world that is always leaving us, even as we ourselves must leave it.”
DéLana R. A. Dameron is an artist whose primary medium is storytelling. Her first book of fiction is Redwood Court (Random House, February 2024), a Reese Book Club pick. She is a graduate of New York University’s MFA program in poetry and holds a BA degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her debut poetry collection, How God Ends Us, was selected by Elizabeth Alexander for the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, and her second collection, Weary Kingdom, was chosen by Nikky Finney for the Palmetto Poetry Series. Dameron is also the founder of Saloma Acres, an equestrian and cultural space in her hometown in South Carolina, where she resides.
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