17 Facts About Danzy Senna

Danzy Senna is the author of six books and numerous essays about race, gender and American identity, including Caucasia, Symptomatic, New People, and most recently Colored Television.

Danzy Senna's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vogue, and The New York Times.

Danzy Senna is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Danzy Senna was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, the middle child of three.

Danzy Senna's mother is poet and novelist Fanny Howe, who is white and has deep Boston roots.

Danzy Senna was married to Mary Manning, an Irish playwright and writer who emigrated from Dublin to the United States in 1935.

Danzy Senna edited The Fallacy of IQ and is the author of The Black Press and the Struggle for Civil Rights.

Danzy Senna is the son of a black jazz piano player and a Mexican boxer.

Danzy Senna's parents married in 1968, the year after interracial marriage became legal.

Danzy Senna attended classes at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, a school for Black children in Roxbury.

Danzy Senna earned her BA degree in American Studies from Stanford University.

Danzy Senna wrote her honors thesis on the works of writers Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, and William Faulkner.

Danzy Senna received her MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, where she wrote her first novel, Caucasia.

Danzy Senna returned east after graduate school and lived in Brooklyn, New York, for many years.

Danzy Senna becomes the object of an older woman's attention after they bond over their similarly mixed heritage.

Danzy Senna's mother is a white woman with a blue-blood Bostonian lineage.

Danzy Senna's father is of African-American and Mexican descent, the son of a single mother and an unknown father.