Land of Love and Drowning (Yanique)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 20, 1978
• Where—St. Thomas, Virgin Islands
• Education—B.A., Tufts University; M.F.A. University of Houston
• Awards—Rona Jaffe Writers' Award; Pushcart Prize (more below)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, and St. Thomas, Virgin Islands


Tiphanie Yanique is a Caribbean fiction writer, poet and essayist, whose debut novel Land of Love and Drowning was published in 2014.

Yanique's maternal roots are in the Virgin Islands and her paternal roots in Dominica. She was raised in the Hospital Ground neighborhood of St. Thomas by her grandmother, Beulah Smith Harrigan, a former children’s librarian. Her biological grandfather was Dr. Andre Galiber of St. Croix. All her grandparents are now deceased.

Education and teaching
In 2000, Yanique earned her undergraduate degree from Tufts University in Massachusetts. Shortly after graduating, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in Literature in English and Creative Writing at The University of the West Indies for which she conducted research on Caribbean women writers, such as Merle Hodge and Erna Brodber in Trinidad and Tobago.

She went on to receive her Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Houston in 2006, where she held a Cambor Fellowship. Later that year she served as the 2006-2007 Writer-in Residence/Parks Fellow at Rice University, teaching creative writing, fiction and nonfiction, and working as the faculty editor of The Rice Review literary magazine.

From 2007-2011, she taught undergraduate and graduate writing and teaching courses as an assistant professor of creative writing and Caribbean literature at Drew University in New Jersey—during which time she also worked as an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine (2007–08) and an associate editor of Post No Ills Magazine (2008–11), as well as the director of writing and curriculum at the Virgin Islands Summer Writers Program (2008-2011).

She is currently an assistant professor of writing at The New School in New York City, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate students.

Writing
Yanique’s debut collection How to Escape a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories (2010) received praise from the Caribbean Review of Books, Boston Globe, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among other journals. Her children’s picture book I am the Virgin Islands (2012) was commissioned by the First Lady of the Virgin Islands as a gift to the children of the Virgin Islands. Yanique’s husband, photographer Moses Djeli, created the images for the book.

Her short fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, Best African American Fiction, Transition Magazine, American Short Fiction, London Magazine, Prism International, Callaloo, Boston Review, and other journals and anthologies.

Accolades
In 2011, Yanique won the BOCAS Fiction Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the National Book Foundation recognized her as one of their 5 under 35 honorees, an award that celebrates five young fiction writers selected by past National Book Award Winners and Finalists. She was one of the three writers awarded the 2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for fiction, along with Helen Phillips and Lori Ostlund.

She is also the winner of a 2008 Pushcart Prize for her short story the “The Bridge Stories” and the Kore Press Short Fiction Award for her short story “The Saving Work. She has also been awarded the 2006 Boston Review Fiction Prize for her short story “How to Escape from a Leper Colony.” She received The Academy of American Poets Prize in 2000 and has had residencies with Bread Loaf, Callaloo, Squaw Valley, and the Cropper Foundation for Caribbean Writers.

Personal
Tiphanie currently lives between Brooklyn, NY, and St. Thomas, VI, with her husband, son and daughter. (From Wikipedia.)