Ayana Mathis received her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she subsequently became the first African American woman to hold the position of Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing. She has taught in the MFA writing programs at Columbia University and Rutgers University at Newark. Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012), was a New York Times Bestseller, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0; it was also long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Legacy Award. Mathis’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Financial Times, Glamour, and Guernica and has been supported by the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, and a Michener Copernicus Fellowship.
At the Academy, Mathis will work on her new novel, “A Violent Woman” (forthcoming with Knopf).
It tells the story of Dutchess and Lena Carson, an estranged mother and daughter separated not
only by a thousand miles but also by Dutchess’s shadowy past as an itinerant blues singer, and
Lena’s mental illness and recruitment into STEP, a radical political group loosely based on MOVE,
active in Philadelphia in the 1970s and ’80s. Dutchess lives in Bonaparte, Alabama, a once vibrant
African American town and refuge during the Jim Crow era now depopulated and menaced by
developers. Lena’s home is Philadelphia, a city dogged by fiscal woes and violence. She and her son,
Toussaint, move constantly from place to place, as Lena’s emotional instability grows and her
involvement with STEP and its leader leads her to transcendence—and eventual tragedy.
“Dutchess and Lena are disruptive and disrupting women, wanderers along the margins of
conventional life whose experiences swing between joy and devastation,” Mathis writes. The
“violent women” of the title, they are also free women, “women who enact who or what they are
despite the strictures placed on them by their communities, by society, or even their loved ones.”
The book details the high costs of this freedom: for Dutchess, isolation and estrangement, for
Lena, dislocation. “It is possible, “Mathis asks, “for people wounded by personal circumstance and
societal ills to fully recover?” She will explore this question amid Berlin’s own uniquely fraught
history.
Meet Ayana Mathis
A short portrait filmed at the Hans Arnhold Center, introducing the work and ideas behind fellows’ projects in Berlin.
Upcoming events
Discover what’s coming up in the Academy’s public program this semester.
Past events
Lectures, readings, and conversations from the Academy’s public program.
Inflections of Belief
Writer Ayana Mathis discusses the religious inflections in the fiction she reads, writes, and critiques.
The Unsettled: A Novel
A reading and discussion with novelist Ayana Mathis
A Violent Woman: A Novel in Progress
Novelist Ayana Mathis discusses her forthcoming work.
Berlin Journal Articles
Essays, interviews, and creative work published in the Academy’s annual magazine.
Books
Books written by fellows of the Academy, many begun during a semester in Berlin.
Videos
Lectures, readings, and conversations filmed at the Hans Arnhold Center.
A Violent Woman: A Novel in Progress
Ayana Mathis discusses her forthcoming novel, “A Violent Woman.”
Explore Past Fellows
Hakim Abderrezak
Marco Abel
David Abraham
