Author of Freshwater, PET, and Death of Vivek Oji, Akwaeke Emezi, has announced their new book, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir. “My official nonfiction debut, DEAR SENTHURAN: A BLACK SPIRIT MEMOIR, is coming out on June 8,” they wrote on Twitter recently.
“Through candid, intimate correspondence with friends, lovers, and family, Emezi traces the unfolding of a self and the unforgettable journey of a creative spirit stepping into power in the human world. Their story weaves through transformative decisions about their gender and body, their precipitous path to success as a writer, and the turmoil of relationships on an emotional, romantic, and spiritual plane, culminating in a book that is as tender as it is brutal,” the synopsis of the book reads.
“FRESHWATER was masked as fiction, so it trojan-horsed its way through the machine, but DEAR SENTHURAN wears no disguise, only the accumulation of bloody skins that have been flayed off me. I would not have made it through the process of publishing this book without the same spiritfam that I wrote these letters to. They helped me hold the center when whiteness tried to shift the book into something that would be more legible to it, a gesture that is inevitably and horrifically violent to experience when making work like this, work drenched in Black spirit, written to us and for us, saying we are more than enough and we do not need to explain a single thing to our oppressors,” Emezi writes.
The book will be released on June 8, 2021, and is now available for pre-order via bookshops or the link here: https://www.akwaeke.com/dear-senthuran
“I’m so proud of this book [because] I wrote it spirit-first, without disguise,” Akwaeke Emezi says. “For those curious about the behind-the-scenes of my writing career/success, I got y’all too! This book is THE most rigorous work I’ve engaged in since Freshwater. It’s also a sequel/companion to [Freshwater]!”
Their debut YA novel PET was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and a Lambda Literary Award, as well as an Indie Next selection. Their debut autobiographical novel FRESHWATER (Grove Atlantic) is in early development as a TV series at FX, has been translated into twelve languages and won the 2019 Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree) and the Nommo Award.
Author photo by Kate Bomz, and Cover art by Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze.
