A Novel in Progress

At the Academy, Gyasi will work on her second novel, in which she explores the psychic cost of immigration on a Ghanaian-American family.“The question of how black immigrants navigate America’s fraught racial dynamics is something central to all of my work,” Gyasi writes. “But in this novel, I’m particularly interested in the costs of assimilation and integration on the immigrant, and whether cultural isolation due to a society’s unwillingness or inability to acknowledge its changing demographics can contribute to a deeper sense of loneliness and depression.”