Danzy Senna

Growing up in public schools it was often difficult to find literary characters that I could happily relate to on matters surrounding race and sexuality. Even when, making my way through High School, popular authors like James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison appeared in the curriculum, their characters felt foreign to me in their very public experiences of oppression.

Though her debut novel, "Caucasia," was a tab bit explicit for my taste, in her more recent work, Danzy Senna' writes about race and gender without weighing her characters down with all of the commonly understood markings of racial and gender oppression. Her characters are, in a sense, free to be as racially invisible as their counterparts in White-American fiction. Perhaps this resonates with me because I grew up in communities where racism and sexism operated fiercly through subtexts and micro-aggressions, but almost never blatantly.

I am impressed by Senna's writing because it is elegant, subtle, and nuanced in just the right places, but also because I feel that she's done something very necessary by creating a book that I believe can count itself in the genre of "resistance literature," without ever calling attention to itself as such.