The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, Viviane Eng speaks with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Harper, 2021).

Honoreé Fannone Jeffers headshot

Photo by Sydney A. Foster

1. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?
My father was a Black Arts Movement poet, and so, when I first remember language, I remember his poetry readings in the early to mid-1970s in Durham, NC. I was a very little girl sitting beside my mother in the audience and hearing people shout like in my maternal grandmother’s church, down in Eatonton, GA. Only it wasn’t a preacher talking about the Bible. It was my daddy reading poetry about being Black and powerful. Sometimes, ladies in the audience would begin weeping ecstatically when he read his poems.