Tiphanie Yanique
“I have always understood myself to be a writer. On the most elemental level, as long as I’ve known my own name, as long as I’ve had a consciousness, I’ve also been writing – creating stories. So in that way, it’s always been part of me...But I think the reason I’m a professional writer has to do with the fact that my mother and my grandmother were both writers before me.”
“Yanique is a writer’s writer, one of the most inventive and talented stylists of her generation… [She] explores the way love can echo along the corridors of history, through police brutality and a pandemic, deftly weaving and juxtaposing the trajectories that make love possible”
“Back and forth, through time and space, we examine the human propensity to love, to fail at loving, to love again…. On this tumultuous mapping of American magic, we find ourselves at the center. [Monster in the Middle] boldly tells us: You are here.”
“A few years ago, Tiphanie Yanique wowed us with her phenomenal story collection, How to Escape from a Leper Colony. Now she brings us this astonishing and wondrous novel. Multilayered, multigenerational and epic in both talent and scope, Land of Love And Drowning is a stunning first novel about family, history, home and much, much more. Tiphanie Yanique’s tremendous talents and incredible storytelling will astound you and leave you breathless.”
“Through the voices and lives of its native people, Yanique offers an affecting narrative of the Virgin Islands that pulses with life, vitality, and a haunting evocation of place. ”
Tiphanie Yanique is that rare writer who has received critical acclaim and awards in three literary genres: poetry, the novel, and short stories. She is also an outspoken activist on behalf of the Caribbean Diaspora, having appeared on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, and published a passionate op-ed in The New York Times on the US response to hurricanes in the Caribbean.
Her second novel, Monster in the Middle, was published by Riverhead Books in October 2021 to wide acclaim. Vulture praised her as “one of the most inventive and talented stylists of her generation.” Her poetry collection, Wife (Peepal Tree Press UK, 2015), won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. Her debut novel, Land of Love and Drowning (Riverhead Books, 2014), won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, among other honors. Her debut collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, (Graywolf Press, 2010) was a 2010 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She has additionally been awarded the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, O Magazine, and other outlets.
Originally from the Virgin Islands, she now lives in Atlanta, where she is a professor at Emory University.
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