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Essays & Writings
The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.
Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase "intersectionality" to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.
In Misbehaving at the Crossroads, Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women's public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women's ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.
Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.
What are you reading this week? (8/14/2025)
Misbehaving at the Crossroads by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
-Dorothy_H
"Jeffers crafts not just a history of Black women in the United States but an essential way of looking at their inheritance—one that folds familiarity into proficiency. Generous, wise, and fearless, she travels through the wounds of past and present with remarkable grace and gripping narratives...In lucid, unwavering prose, Jeffers traces a lineage of Black womanhood in the United States." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[I]ncisive...Deftly moving between sharp critique and an intimate, confessional tone, this astonishes." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Jeffers has formed her garden, with the fertile roots laid down in her homage to Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, and planted seeds that will inspire readers to seek out old stories with an understanding of feminism and intersectionality." —Library Journal
"I would follow Jeffers's voice anywhere. Her wide-ranging symphony of essays on Black womanhood is a treat -- incisive, intellectual, intimate, funny, and formally inventive. I felt like I was listening to a brave yet vulnerable big sister riff blazingly on topics of history, family, politics and culture. Above all, she writes with a poet's heart." —Emily Raboteau, author of Lessons for Survival
"The poet 'shall draw us in with love and terror' and help us see more clearly our own times. Honorée Jeffers has done exactly that with this extraordinary collection of essays and writings. Sit with this book, revel in its use of language, struggle with the ideas, acknowledge that something intimate and vulnerable is happening on the page, and witness the expansiveness of Jeffers's imagination." —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of We Are The Leaders We Have Been Looking For
This information about Misbehaving at the Crossroads was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Sydney A. Foster
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award, and five poetry collections, including the NAACP Image Award-winning The Age of Phillis, also nominated for the National Book Award.
Author Interview
Link to Honoree Fanonne Jeffers's Website
Name Pronunciation
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers: honor-ray fa-nan jeffers (listen to audio interview)
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