Sadeqa Johnson
Rhodes Photo LLCSadeqa Johnson is the award-winning author of "And Then There Was Me," "Second House From the Corner," "Love in a Carry-on Bag" and "Yellow Wife." "Yellow Wife" is a 2022 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy nominee, a BCLA Literary Honoree and a Barnes & Noble book club pick in paperback. Her other accolades include winning the National Book Club Conference Award, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the USA Best Book Award for Best Fiction. She is a Kimbilio Fellow and teaches in the M.F.A. program at Drexel University. Originally from Philadelphia, she currently lives near Richmond, Va., with her husband and three children.
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Awards: National Book Club Award, the Phillis Wheatley Award and the USA Best Book Award for best fiction.
Communities: African American
Motherhood & Laborious Times
Jennifer Coburn, Armando Lucas Correa and Sadeqa Johnson come to the festival with stories about mothers and mothers-to-be, each of whom must navigate particularly difficult circumstances -- from fraught race relations to world wars.
Student Union Santa Rita (Seats 110)
Sat, Mar 4, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Fiction / Literature
Signing area: Sales & Signing Area - UA BookStore Tent (on Mall) (following presentation)
Panelists:
Jennifer Coburn,
Armando Lucas Correa,
Sadeqa Johnson
Moderator: Ashley Hansen
She Persisted
In this session, Laurie Albanese, Sadeqa Johnson, and Nghi Vo will discuss ways their protagonists refuse to let other people - and social norms - stand in the way of making their dreams a reality.
Modern Languages Room 350 (Seats 318, Wheelchair accessible)
Sun, Mar 5, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Fiction / Literature
Signing area: Sales & Signing Area - Central Mall (following presentation)
Panelists:
Laurie Albanese,
Sadeqa Johnson,
Nghi Vo
Moderator: Emily Walsh
Books:
The House of Eve
Fiction / Literature
Simon & Schuster
March 2023
ISBN 9781982197360
352 pages
From the award-winning author of Yellow Wife, a daring, beautiful, and redemptive novel that explores what it means to be a woman and a mother, and how much one is willing to sacrifice to achieve her greatest goal.
1950s Philadelphia: fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright.
Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University, they fall madly in love. But William hails from one of DC’s elite wealthy Black families, and his parents don’t let just anyone into their fold. Eleanor hopes that a baby will make her finally feel at home in William’s family and grant her the life she’s been searching for. But having a baby—and fitting in—is easier said than done.
With their stories colliding in the most unexpected of ways, Ruby and Eleanor will both make decisions that shape the trajectory of their lives. More/less
Yellow Wife
A Novel
Fiction / Literature
Simon and Schuster
December 2021
ISBN 9781982149116
Trade Paperback, 288 pages
A Best Book of the Year by NPR and Christian Science Monitor
Called “wholly engrossing” by New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Grissom, this “fully immersive” (Lisa Wingate, #1 bestselling author of Before We Were Yours) story follows an enslaved woman forced to barter love and freedom while living in the most infamous slave jail in Virginia.
Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world.
She’d been promised freedom on her eighteenth birthday, but instead of the idyllic life she imagined with her true love, Essex Henry, Pheby is forced to leave the only home she has ever known. She unexpectedly finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil’s Half Acre, a jail in Richmond, Virginia, where the enslaved are broken, tortured, and sold every day. There, Pheby is exposed not just to her Jailer’s cruelty but also to his contradictions. To survive, Pheby will have to outwit him, and she soon faces the ultimate sacrifice. More/less
