Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-American novelist, born in 1989. She is best known for Homegoing, her 2016 debut, which follows two half sisters born in eighteenth-century Ghana and their descendants across eight generations, ending in the American South. Her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, published in 2020, is a coming-of-age story. Gyasi was raised in Huntsville, Alabama, studied English at Stanford, and earned an MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; for Homegoing she won the John Leonard Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.
