Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings

Review Quotes:

A People, Amazon, Seattle Public Library, Read Between the Spines, Ms. Magazine, Goode Reader, Bookstr, and Publishers Lunch, "Book of the Month" * A Publishers Weekly, BookPage, BookRiot, The Millions, Medium Loc'D Booktician, Read Between the Spines, and Flyleaf Books "Most Anticipated" * A Washington Post, AARP, Garden & Gun, Literary Hub, Vulture, Zibby Owens, Atlanta Journal-Constituion, Eagle Harbor Books, Deep South Magazine, She Reads, and Tertulia "Book to Read this Summer" --

"Deftly moving between sharp critique and an intimate, confessional tone, this astonishes." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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

"The work of Honorée's mother, Dr. Trellie James Jeffers, has long inspired me, guided me, made me feel things familiar, and question the familiar. Honorée's pen is as sharp as her mother's and just as instructive. Yet different somehow still. With a poetic voice all her own, she holds our hands and ushers us (back) to places familiar, places forgotten -- to the crossroads." -- Yaba Blay, author of One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race

"Once again Jeffers reveals her genius for plumbing the depth and complexity of Black women's lives. With compassion, rigor, and great beauty, she unveils the tensions that circumscribe public understanding of our womanhood while challenging the larger culture and us to see ourselves in the full flowering of our gendered humanity. A personal, moving, and revelatory tour de force of understanding, care, and analysis. And like always, Honorée leaves me wanting more. Brava!" -- Blair LM Kelley, Ph.D., author of Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class

"Jeffer's nonfiction debut is incisive and necessary reading." -- People

"Equal parts memoir, history, polemic and poetry... There's a difference between being at a crossroads--weighing an important decision at a crucial moment--and being at the crossroads: a fabled space in the Black diasporic tradition where powers can be granted, whisked away or reclaimed by the spirit world, sometimes for the price of a soul. With her nonfiction debut, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers comfortably inhabits this mythic juncture, telling the stories of Black women in her genealogy with a literary style that joyfully resists easy categorization."
-- New York Times Book Review

"Jeffers had a breakout hit in 2021 with her novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, one of The Post's 10 Best Books that year. Her new collection of essays is animated by the same capacious interest in the history of Black women, from colonial times and earlier up to the present day. Some of the book's most powerful writing is about her own family." -- Washington Post, "30 books to read this summer"

"Jeffers made a monumental pivot to fiction with 2021's centuries-spanning epic, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois. Though certainly a leap, her debut novel continued what has become something of a career-long project for her, foregrounding the stories of heroic Black women. Now, Jeffers is carrying that project forward in still another mode, turning to personal and political essays to reflect on the complicated -- at times seemingly impossible -- position that Black women like her occupy in a culture determined to reduce them to virtually anything but themselves." -- NPR

"There is power in these writings....(Jeffers) will continue to misbehave, and we are all the better for it." -- Medium

"Part personal writing, part historical examination, this is a thought-provoking work threaded through with Jeffers' poetic style." -- BookRiot

"A poetic meditation on intersectionality... Jeffer's ability to infuse words with emotion inspires more than a few goose bumps.... one can only anticipate how the crossroads of her imagination and lived experiences will shape her next work of fiction." -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Stunning." -- People, Top 10 Books of the Year, on The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

"The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is epic in its scope. [It] traces the story of a family, the town in Georgia where they come from, and their migration outward over generations. The word epic is overused these days, but this book was meant to be an epic and it is. . . . This is one of the most American books I have ever read. It's a book about the United States. It's a book about the legacy of slavery in this country. . . . And it's also a book about traumas and loves that sustain over generations." -- Noel King, NPR, on The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

"Triumphant. . . . Quite simply the best book that I have read in a very, very long time. . . . An epic tale of adventure that brings to mind characters you never forget: Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time, Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn. . . . The historical archives of Black Americans are too often filled with broad outlines of what happened. . . . One of the many triumphs of Love Songs is how Jeffers transforms this large history into a story that feels specific and cinematic in the telling. . . . Just as Toni Morrison did in Beloved, Jeffers uses fiction to fill in the gaping blanks of those who have been rendered nameless and therefore storyless. . . . A sweeping, masterly debut." -- Veronica Chambers, New York Times Book Review, on The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

"A feat of beauty and breadth." -- Time, 100 Must-Read Books of the Year, on The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

"Whatever must be said to get you to heft this daunting debut novel by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, I'll say, because The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is the kind of book that comes around only once a decade. Yes, at roughly 800 pages, it is, indeed, a mountain to climb, but the journey is engrossing, and the view from the summit will transform your understanding of America. . . . With the depth of its intelligence and the breadth of its vision, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is simply magnificent." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post, on The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

"Stupendously good. . . . Jeffers' renditions of Black family traditions and the burden of respectability politics are spot-on, and made me wish the book was even longer." -- Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR Best Books of the Year

"A sweeping matriarchal epic that leads readers through a majestic tour of race, family, and love in America, this striking debut novel by an award-winning poet is, indeed, the Great American Novel at its finest." -- Joshunda Sanders, Boston Globe's Best Books of the Year, on The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

"For me, this doesn't take much thought. It is THE novel of the year. This astonishing work is the first fiction by a writer whose poetry collections are profound and beautiful. In this book, a young woman follows her family history into the recesses of slavery in America. The young woman is a historian, so we are following her into her stunning access to the documentation of her family's capture and beyond, to the present." -- Michael Silverblatt, KCRW's Top 10 Books of the Year

"With The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, Jeffers has created an opus, an indelible entry to the canon of contemporary American literature and one of the foundational fictional texts of Black literature worthy of sitting alongside Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing." -- Latria Graham, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

"If you read one book this year, choose this one. I went to bed thinking of Ailey Pearl Garfield and woke up thinking of her. With the arrival of this epic novel of family, race, and ancestral legacy, one of America's finest poets has announced herself as a storyteller of the highest magnitude. Absolutely brilliant." -- Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author of Wench and Balm

"As one of the most prolific poets of our time, Jeffers has penned a family saga that is just as brilliant as it is necessary, just as intimate as it is expansive. An outstanding portrait of an American family and in turn, an outstanding portrait of America." -- Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give

"This sweeping, brilliant and beautiful narrative is at once a love song to Black girlhood, family, history, joy, pain . . . and so much more. In Jeffers's deft hands, the story of race and love in America becomes the great American novel." -- Jacqueline Woodson, author of Red at the Bone and Another Brooklyn

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.

Review Citations:

• Library Journal 05/01/2025 pg. 10 (EAN 9780063246638, Hardcover)
• Publishers Weekly 04/21/2025 (EAN 9780063246638, Hardcover) - *Starred Review
• Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2025 (EAN 9780063246638, Hardcover) - *Starred Review
• Booklist 06/01/2025 pg. 6 (EAN 9780063246638, Hardcover) - *Starred Review
• BookPage 07/01/2025 (EAN 9780063246638, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:Jeffers, Honoree Fanonne

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.