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Photo credit: Casey Curry
Natashia Deón is a two-time NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literature, practicing criminal attorney and author of the critically acclaimed novels, GRACE andThe Perishing. GRACE was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and awarded Best Debut Novel by the American Library Association’s Black Caucus. A Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Nominee for Outstanding Fiction and a PEN America Fellow, Deón has also been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yale, Prague’s Creative Writing Program, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is a professor of creative writing at UCLA and Antioch University. Her personal essays have been featured in The New York Times,Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, American Short Fiction, Buzzfeed and other places.
“Natashia Deón writes with her nerves, generating terrific suspense. And her style is so visual it plays tricks on the imagination — did I just watch that scene? Or did I read it? It’s Ms. Deón’s real and rare ability to make reading a felt, almost physical experience.”—Jennifer Senior, New York Times
“This isn’t a book. It’s a touchstone. It’s an oracle. It’s a mirror in which you will see your authentic self, reflected on the pages. The Perishing is one part lyrical mystery, one part history lesson you didn’t learn in school, one part time machine. It’s a lush, genre-smashing, philosophical experience of a novel that blew my mind even as it broke my heart.” —Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Available in bookstores everywhere
Artist’s Statement
All history is inevitably a trial; a trial in our conversations, our minds, in the way we see ourselves and each other. For me, they are my novels. I am a literary artist who is also a practicing criminal attorney in Los Angeles, and like millions of “caregivers of adults” worldwide, I became a caregiver overnight.
I used to be ashamed to admit I was an artist when I was in a room of my legal peers. And in the rooms of artists, I was ashamed to be a lawyer. I am not anymore.
Law and caring for others, color the way I see the world, my morality, my reasoning, empathy, and my novels. Through fictionalized historical facts, multidimensional characters, faith, and experience, my novels aim to resurrect the past and build a deeper understanding of American history and its connection to our present malady.
My creative work often draws from the psyche of my legal work—crimes, justifiable excuse, and its inequitable application—as well as social constructs, consequences, and Black history. In the spirit of great Black women novelists such as Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler, my work is a doorway, hoping to engage empathy through understanding and in this way, inspire our nation to move closer to a safer union for all.
CONTACTS
SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS & FIRESIDES
Anya Backlund
Blue Flower Arts
A Literary Speaking Agency
845 677 8559 Office
619 944 9247 Cell
anya@blueflowerarts.com
FILM & TV CO-AGENTS
CAA/ICM
Los Angeles, CA 90067
SOMETHING ELSE?
natashia@natashiadeon.com
“God, The Perishing. Where do I even begin? It’s riveting, my God.”
—Crime Reads
“This marriage of period lit and science fiction will plug the Lovecraft Country sized hole in your heart.”
-Keyaira Boone, ESSENCE
“Set against the backdrop of Depression-era Los Angeles, this novel evokes the storytelling prowess of Octavia Butler. A young Black woman named Lou wakes up in an alley with no memory of where she came from or how she got there. Lou tries to make the best of her unsettling circumstances and pursues an education. When she meets a firefighter at a downtown boxing gym, she’s shocked to realize that she’s known his face since the days of living with her foster family. Could Lou be immortal? And if so, why?” –VW, LitHub
THE PERISHING NAMED A "MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK" by...
INDIE NEXT USA TODAY
THE NEW YORK TIMES
ESSENCE SHONDALAND
PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY BOOK RIOT
LIBRARY JOURNAL LITHUB
CRIME READS THE MILLIONS
“A bold and bracing novel steeped in LA history about love and power and justice.”
Bringing to mind Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed and Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby, Deon’s novel will dazzle and devastate readers. It is truly a novel that defies genre, carrying elements of historical fiction, scifi, and lit fic. I will be yelling about this book as I thrust it into readers hands for a long time to come.” —Faith Park-Dodge, Page 158 Books (Wake Forest, NC)
“What do these ghosts want—and why is literary fiction suddenly so full of them? (See: Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders; White Tears, by Hari Kunzru; Grace, by Natashia Deón; The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead.) It’s the past that won’t stay past, to paraphrase Faulkner. The ghosts—most of them, at any rate—want to rest, but they need restitution first.”
—The New York Times
“Before then, I believed the truth was a gift and even compassionate lies could never know it. Unbirthday parties became my way to settle an incongruity and to do what I love — celebrate, despite the weight of everything. It is my Black joy. I won’t surrender.”
– Natashia Deón
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