Bernice McFadden is an American novelist. She signed up for courses that concentrated on Afro-American history and literature, as well as creative writing, poetry, and journalism. She credits the two years spent under the guidance of her professors as well as the years spent lost in the words of her favorite authors, to the caliber of writer she has become. In 1997, McFadden quit her job and dedicated seven months to re-writing the novel that would become Sugar. In February 1999, after nearly 10 years, four drafts and 73 rejection letters, Sugar was finally acquired by Dutton Publishers. The New York Times described her 2010 novel Glorious as exhibiting "a wonderful ear for dialogue." Her 2016 novel The Book of Harlan was awarded the 2017 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction. The book, in which a jazz musician is imprisoned at Buchenwald after migrating from the U.S. to Paris in the 1930s, was called "simply miraculous" by The Washington Post, and listed as a notable work of 2016. In 2017 it was announced that Book of Harlan would be adapted into a film by director Mark Tonderai.
At MacDowell, she began the first draft of a fictionalized account of the life of Zora Neale Huston entitled "Glorious."
Portrait by Makeda Miller Photography
