Ayana Mathis

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Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012), and The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023), which was the inaugural winner of McSweeney’s Gabe Hudson Prize. The novel was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Award and was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023, and a best of 2023 by The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews and Oprah Daily. Her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times Bestseller, a selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award. Mathis’s essays and criticism have been published in The New York Times and The Atlantic, among others. She was a 2024-25 Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis received her MFA from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is pursuing her Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary. She teaches at Hunter College in the MFA Program.

As a Hodder Fellow, Mathis will work on a memoir-in-essays entitled My Brief Salvation, critical essays about iterations of belief in literature, political life, and the writer's own formative years in the turbulent 1980s.

Ayana Mathis among finalists for 2025 John Dos Passos Prize | Longwood University, October 2025