Novel-in-Progress

At the Academy, Flournoy will work on her second novel, a series of stories about the lives of young African-American women in present-day New York and Los Angeles, together with how she imagines those cities in twenty years. Whereas The Turner House looked back at the black migrant experiences of the 1940s, this work asks how different kinds of movements might change the way we think about African-American communities in the future. Flournoy writes, “I am interested in the relationship between character and community, and how setting, as well as the other people who inhabit a space, influence our sense of identity.” In the United States and elsewhere, Flournoy notes that the idea of what constitutes a community is rapidly changing, as are the demographics of most major cities. Apart from immigration, census data shows an accelerated movement of black people from inner cities to the suburbs and exurbs, as well as back to the American South. This is the result of white reinvestment and renewed interest in city centers, and the relocation of corporate headquarters to Southern states. In this second novel, Flournoy interweaves the stories of new patterns of migration and the lives of individual black women. Over the twenty-year span of the novel, she describes how their storylines are linked by geography, chronology, and friendships.