LibGuides: African American Women Writers: Nicole Dennis-Benn

Dissatisfied with the educational opportunities and lack of mobility in Jamaica, Nicole Dennis-Benn moved to New York City to live with her father and stepmother after her 1999 high school graduation. She earned a bachelor's degree in nutrition sciences at Cornell University in 2003. She then attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Feeling obligated to obtain a medical degree to fulfill her parents' dreams for her, Dennis-Benn studied public health. Although she often considered changing her focus to writing, she earned a master of public health degree, with a concentration in behavioral aspects of health/reproductive health and women's studies in 2006. Dennis-Benn returned to New York and, for several years, worked in public health. She began blogging under the pseudonym Grace Jones and writing stories. Around 2008, while working as a research project manager at Columbia University, she decided to pursue a degree in writing rather than a doctorate in public health. Inspired by a former English professor who had urged her to take her writing more seriously, Dennis-Benn enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College and completed a master of fine arts degree in 2012. Dennis-Benn has written numerous short stories, interviews, and essays that have appeared in literary magazines as well as in the New York Times, Ebony, and Feminist Wire. Her first novel, Here Comes the Sun, was published in 2016. It received the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian fiction and was named one of the best books of 2016 by the New York Times, Kirkus, NPR, BuzzFeed, the San Francisco Chronicle, Barnes and Noble, and Entertainment Weekly.*

Genre: Coming-of-age stories; LGBTQIA fiction; Literary fiction; Political fiction; Psychological fiction

More about Nicole Dennis-Benn at ProQuest One Literature

*Lightner, Barb. “Nicole Dennis-Benn.” Literary Biographies, Nov. 2018, pp. 1–3. Literary Reference Center.

By Nicole Dennis-Benn

Patsy: a novel by Nicole Dennis-Benn
HeNicole Dennis-Benn introduces readers to an unforgettable heroine for our times: the eponymous Patsy, who leaves her young daughter behind in Jamaica to follow Cicely, her oldest friend, to New York. Beating with the pulse of a long-withheld confession and peppered with lilting patois, Patsy gives voice to a woman who looks to America for the opportunity to love whomever she chooses, bravely putting herself first. But to survive as an undocumented immigrant, Patsy is forced to work as a nanny, while back in Jamaica her daughter, Tru, ironically struggles to understand why she was left behind.
Can we all be feminists? : new writing from Brit Bennett, Nicole Dennis-Benn, and 15 others on intersectionality, identity, and the way forward for feminism
In Can We All Be Feminists?, seventeen established and emerging writers from diverse backgrounds wrestle with these questions, exploring what feminism means to them in the context of their other identities--from a hijab-wearing Muslim to a disability rights activist to a body-positive performance artist to a transgender journalist. Includes "Unapologetic" by Nicole Dennis-Benn

About Nicole Dennis-Benn

Taking Flight: Caribbean women writing from abroad by Jennifer Donahue
Caribbean women have long utilized the medium of fiction to break the pervasive silence surrounding abuse and exploitation. Contemporary works by such authors as Tiphanie Yanique and Nicole Dennis-Benn illustrate the deep-rooted consequences of trauma based on gender, sexuality, and race, and trace the steps that women take to find safer ground from oppression. Taking Flight examines the immigrant experience in contemporary Caribbean women's writing and considers the effects of restrictive social mores. In the texts examined in Taking Flight, culturally sanctioned violence impacts the ability of female characters to be at home in their bodies or in the spaces they inhabit. The works draw attention to the historic racialization and sexualization of black women's bodies and continue the legacy of narrating black women's long-standing contestation of systems of oppression. Arguing that there is a clear link between trauma, shame, and migration, with trauma serving as a precursor to the protagonists' emigration, Jennifer Donahue focuses on how female bodies are policed; how moral, racial, and sexual codes are linked; and how the enforcement of social norms can function as a form of trauma.