Author Description

Jeneteenth draws on the full richness of America's black cultural heritage, from the dazzling range of vernacular sources in the novel's language to the way its structure echoes the call-and-response pattern of the black church and the riffs and bass lines of jazz. It offers jubuliant proof that whatever else it means to be a true American, it means to be somehow black, as Ellison once wrote. For even as Senator Sunraider was bathed from birth in the deep and nourishing waters of African-American folkways, so too are all Americans.