Nadia Owusu on Aftershocks: A Memoir with Mitchell S. Jackson

Jan
11:30pm
Nadia Owusu on Aftershocks: A Memoir with Mitchell S. Jackson

By Kweli Journal
“Nadia Owusu has lived multiple lives and each has demanded much of her. She has met and surpassed those demands with her memoir, Aftershocks. Owusu is half-Armenian, half-Ghanaian; socially privileged and psychologically wounded. She spends her life moving between Europe, Africa and New York, reeling from her mother’s desertion and her father’s death. Her task and burden are threefold: to chronicle the historical wounds and legacies of each country; to chart her own descent into grief, mania and madness; to begin the work of emotional reconstruction. She does so with unerring honesty and in prose that is both rigorous and luminous.”—MARGO JEFFERSON, author of Negroland: A Memoir, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

"Aftershocks is a triptych feat of style: the lucid language, the masterful handling of time, the brilliance of its seismic theme. It’s also an astute exploration of the long legacy of colonialism. Owusu is a product of that political and cultural collision, and one of the great gifts of this compelling memoir is the moving narrative of her reconciling that identity. And if that weren’t enough, Aftershocks is an indelible portrait of Owusu’s resilience in the face of almost unfathomable familial trauma as well as her immortal love for her father."—MITCHELL S. JACKSON, author of Survival Math

“Nadia Owusu's Aftershocks bleeds honesty. It is a majestically rendered telling of all the history, hurt and love a body can contain. A wonderful work of art made of so many stories and histories it is bursting with both harshness and perseverance. An incredible debut.”—NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH, author of New York Times bestseller Friday Black

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NADIA OWUSU is a Brooklyn-based writer and urbanist. Her first book, Aftershocks: A Memoir, was selected as one of 13 new books to watch for in January 2021 by the New York Times, one of BookExpo America’s buzziest books of the year, and one of Oprah.com’s 55 most anticipated books of 2021, among other honors. 

Nadia is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her lyric essay chapbook, So Devilish a Fire won the Atlas Review chapbook contest. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, the Washington Post’s the Lily, Orion, the Literary Review, The Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature, Catapult, Bon Appétit, Epiphany and others. 

By day, Nadia is the Director of Storytelling at Frontline Solutions, a Black-owned consulting firm that helps social-change organizations to define goals, execute plans, and evaluate impact. She is a graduate of Pace University (BA, Political Science) and Hunter College (MS, Urban Policy). She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at the Mountainview low-residency program where she now teaches.

MITCHELL S. JACKSON’s debut novel The Residue Years received wide critical praise. Jackson is the winner of a Whiting Award. His novel also won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN / Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and the Hurston / Wright Legacy Award. His honors include fellowships and awards from Creative Capital, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has been featured on This American Life, on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time Magazine, Esquire Magazine, and Marie Claire Magazine, as well as in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar Magazine, The Paris Review, The Washington Post Magazine, The Guardian, and elsewhere. His nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was published in the spring of 2019 and named a best book of the year by fifteen publications, including NPR, Time Magazine, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed. Jackson is a columnist for Esquire Magazine and teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago. His next novel John of Watts is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jackson is also a well-regarded speaker who has delivered lectures and key note addresses all over the world, including the annual TED Conference, the Ubud (Bali) Writers and Readers Festival, and the Sydney Writers’ Festival, as well as at esteemed institutions, among them Yale University, Brown University, Cornell University, and Columbia University. A formerly incarcerated person, Jackson is also a social justice advocate who, as part of his outreach, visits prisons and youth facilities in the United States and abroad.
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