Bernice L. McFadden is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels including Sugar, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, The Warmest December, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), Glorious, and The Book of Harlan (winner of a 2017 American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction). She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of four awards from the BCALA. Bernice McFadden is also an essayist, short story writer and has written five novels of humorous erotica under the pseudonym Geneva Holliday.
Her most recent novel, Glorious, is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights era. Blending the truth of American history with the fruits of Bernice L. McFadden’s rich imagination, this is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and revival offers a candid portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty. Glorious is ultimately an audacious exploration into the nature of self-hatred, love, possession, ego, betrayal, and, finally, redemption.
Her memoir, Firstborn Girls: A Memoir (March 2025) explores inherited trauma, family secrets, and the enduring bonds of love between mothers and daughters.
“Bernice was an excellent speaker and very social as she interacted with guests before, during, and after the event.” — Battle Creek Reads, 2022
