Bernice McFadden
BERNICE L. McFADDEN is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels including Praise Song for the Butterflies (Long listed for the 2019 Women's Prize in Fiction ) The Book of Harlan (winner of a 2017 American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction) Sugar, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, The Warmest December, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012) and Glorious . She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of four awards from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA).
McFadden has also penned five novels under the pseudonym: Geneva Holliday
She is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Tulane University in New Orleans. She is at work on her sixteenth novel.
“J.W. and Roy didn’t just snatch the childhood away from Emmett; they stole it from every single black child in Mississippi.”
“ 'Sugar, aint you ever had no good time?' she said with a bit of sadness in her voice. 'What you mean?' Sugar said,...'Seems to me that I ain't never see you look up from whatever you were doing and just smile.''Just smile? Smile at what? At who?''Smile into the air, girl!' she said and waved her arm through the air....you better start, 'cause time is running and a life without good times ain't a life worth having.”
“Don't you know sugar is brown first? White folks couldn't stand the fact that something so sweet shared the same color as the people who cut the cane, slopped the hogs and picked the cotton. So they bleached it to resemble them, and now they done gone and fooled everybody. You included.”