What We Lose (Clemmons) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1984-85
• Raised—Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California


Zinzi Clemmons is an American writer, teacher, and editor, whose debut novel What We Lose was published to wide acclaim in 2017. She was raised in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, by a mixed race South African mother and African-American father—and, like her novel's heroine, knows what it feels like to be an outsider. Swarthmore is a mostly white college town (yes, Swarthmore College) outside of Philadelphia: "we were the only black family, and foreign," Clemmons has said. Summers spent in Johannesburg, South Africa, only added to a sense of displacement. And, importantly, like her heroine, she too lost a mother.

Clemmons received her Bachelor's degree at Brown and Master's in Fiction from Columbia. Her writing has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Transition, Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She is also a co-founder and former Publisher of Apogee Journal and a Contributing Editor to LitHub.com.

Married to poet and translator Andre Naffis-Sahely, Clemmons now lives in Los Angeles where she teaches literature and creative writing at The Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College. (Adapted from various online sources.)