Yaa Gyasi is a young Ghanaian-American author. Her first novel, Homegoing, follows the history of Africans in Ghana and African-Americans in the United States from the 19th through 21st centuries. The book received an extremely positive reception from both critics and the public and received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 2017.
Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana, but her family moved to the United States when she was an infant. Her father is a professor and her mother a nurse, so her family moved from Illinois to Tennessee and finally settled in Alabama for the majority of Gyasi's childhood. Gyasi enjoyed reading and writing from a young age. She attended Stanford University as a undergraduate, completing a BA in English, and then received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Gyasi currently lives in Berkeley, California.
Homegoing is the first novel by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi. Following the descendants of an Asante woman named Maame, the novel paints a complex picture of the intertwined histories of Ghana and the United States from the 1700's to present...
Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom was initially published in 2020 by publisher Alfred A. Knopf. The novel follows a 28-year-old PhD candidate at Stanford University named Gifty. Though Gifty is an intelligent woman with a tremendous future ahead of...
