1. Yaa Gyasi was born on 1989 and is a Ghanaian-American novelist.
18 Facts About Yaa Gyasi
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Yaa Gyasi was awarded a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature in 2020.
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Yaa Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana to Sophia, a nurse, and Kwaku Gyasi, a professor of French at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
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Yaa Gyasi's family moved to the United States in 1991 so her father could complete his Ph.
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The family lived in Illinois and Tennessee, and from the age of 10, Yaa Gyasi was raised in Huntsville, Alabama.
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Yaa Gyasi recalls being shy as a child, feeling close to her brothers for their shared experiences as young immigrant children in Alabama, and turning to books as her "closest friends".
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Yaa Gyasi was encouraged by receiving a certificate of achievement signed by LeVar Burton for the first story she wrote, which she had submitted to the Reading Rainbow Young Writers and Illustrators Contest.
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At the age of 17, while attending Grissom High School, Yaa Gyasi was inspired after reading Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon to pursue writing as a career.
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Yaa Gyasi earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Stanford University, as well as a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a creative writing program at the University of Iowa.
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Shortly after graduating from Stanford, Yaa Gyasi began writing her debut novel Homegoing while working at a tech startup company in San Francisco.
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Yaa Gyasi resigned in 2012 when she was accepted to the University of Iowa and switched focus to writing full-time.
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Yaa Gyasi traveled to her mother's ancestral Ashanti home in Kumasi, visited with relatives, and toured the Cape Coast Castle, a colonial trading fort used to hold enslaved Africans before boarding ships to the Americas.
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Yaa Gyasi completed the novel in 2015 and, after numerous initial offers, accepted a seven-figure advance from Knopf.
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Yaa Gyasi's writing has appeared in such publications as African American Review, Callaloo, Guernica The Guardian, and Granta.
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Yaa Gyasi cites Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Baldwin, Edward P Jones, and Jhumpa Lahiri as inspirations.
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In 2017, Yaa Gyasi was chosen by Forbes for their "30 under 30 List".
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In 2021, Yaa Gyasi authored the short story "Bad Blood" to be featured in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story.
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Yaa Gyasi has been outspoken about her widespread recognition as a black author.