Spotlight: Alexis DeVeaux

      

Hobart Book Village Festival of Women Writers welcomes back

Alexis DeVeaux

“Alexis DeVeaux laces together the past and the present with poetic elegance in an intricate and delicate pattern of call and response. Her characters are both mythic and guttural and, like her narrative, glide across social, physical and temporal boundaries, drawing the reader  into an emotional vortex.”  Jewelle Gomez, author of The Gilda Stories

We reprise a conversation between Alexis DeVeaux and Festival co-organizer, Breena Clarke, who met on a beautiful afternoon in early May 2014 in the outdoor courtyard at The Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture/NY Public Library. The two writers, friends and colleagues of long standing, spoke about the legacy of The Schomburg Library and very particularly about the work of Alexis DeVeaux. In the richly inspirational setting, with the sounds of busy Harlem in the background,  De Veaux talked about her novella, Yabo.

 

Alexis DeVeaux talks to Breena Clarke about Harlem and her work  

Yabo is a densely peopled novella that is unpredictable and surprising. It is full of literary serendipity; is filled with fresh turns that direct the reader’s eye to new views – new perspectives.

Clarke: From what tradition, from what place does the title, Yabo come?

DeVeaux: I wanted a title that was not from the western tradition. I wanted to communicate that

time is unbroken

the story is unbroken

the lives are unbroken

no matter how long the time

they are just always threaded together

Yabo means the unbreakable thread.

For Festival 2016, Alexis DeVeaux will present the workshop, The Sentence in Fiction: A Workshop For Writers, designed to assist fiction writers in incorporating the idea that the sentence is an important element in building a fictional narrative.

For more information and to register for Festival 2016. go to: Festival 2016

For more information about the author and her work and to read an excerpt of Yabo:

http://alexisdeveaux.com

To contribute to our Indiegogo fundraising  campaign:  Indiegogo

Other work by Alexis DeVeaux

A Biography of Audre Lorde