From our BEST Arts of the decade feature:
Over the years, Champaign-Urbana has been lucky to play host to some of our nation’s great authors. Add Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ name to that list. With an ethical position that sheds stark light on the American experience and a highly-rewarding prose style, Thompson-Spires’ fiction has earned well-deserved praise from casual readers and literary standard bearers alike. With her debut collection, Heads of the Colored People, Thompson-Spires introduced herself as an essential voice for a generation witness to the gruesome and dehumanizing quote-unquote post-racial politics of our time. Longlisted for the National Book Award, winner of the PEN America Literary Award and the Los Angeles Review Book Prize Award for First Fiction, Thompson-Spires has given us an indispensable artifact with Heads of the Colored People, a collection that will surely endure as a vital text for this moment in our history as it sets the stage for career we’d all be wise to follow closely. (Caleb Curtiss)
Photo by Adrianne Mathiowetz Photography