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Dawnie Walton is the author of the 1970s rock & roll novel The Final Revival of Opal & Nev (37 Ink/Simon & Schuster, March 30, 2021). She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and holds a journalism degree from Florida A&M University. Formerly an editor at Essence and Entertainment Weekly, she has received fellowships in fiction writing from MacDowell and the Tin House Summer Workshop. Born and raised in Jacksonville, Fla., she lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with her husband.
On your nightstand now:
The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor. I remember seeing parts of the TV miniseries adaptation when I was a kid, with that cast of Black women megastars: Oprah Winfrey, Cicely Tyson, Mary Alice, Lynn Whitfield, Jackée Harry. But reading the book for the first time, I'm struck by what a titanic year 1982 was for Black feminist literature, between this novel-in-stories and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Both are daring in their forms and ahead of their time in terms of themes (queer identity, toxic masculinity and more). I'm also reading Hanif Abdurraqib's excellent essay collection A Little Devil in America, and after that am looking forward to Alex McElroy's satire The Atmospherians.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I loved all the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary, but my favorite was Ramona and Her Father. I must have recognized some version of my anxious little self in that book, in the way Ramona worries about her dad losing his job and smoking too many cigarettes. In some ways I saw my family, too, in Cleary's descriptions of the Quimbys' economic situation (not poor but teetering on a brink that can quickly get more precarious) and in the lovely scenes of the family enjoying a simple night out at the Whopperburger.
Your top five authors:
I'm sticking with fiction here, because otherwise this gets too tricky! Here goes: Edwidge Danticat, a master in both short and long forms. Jacqueline Woodson, whose sensory images reverberate in my head. Elena Ferrante, whose full and flawed characters hold me in their grips. Ha Jin, whose stories of romance, duty and family often carry a tinge of the political. And Toni Morrison, not only for her writing but for the example she set as a writer, and for the wisdom she shared with others coming behind her.
Book you've faked reading:
My senior year of high school, we got assigned a ton of novels that I guess are canonical but were, at the time, totally uninteresting to me. Because I was a diligent student, I tried to power through them at first. But then we got assigned Heart of Darkness, and the racism of that book really pissed me off. I just stopped caring about anything else I got assigned to read that year, and bullsh*tted my way through essays about Mrs Dalloway, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Madame Bovary (the last I read in recent years and actually enjoyed).
Book you're an evangelist for:
Funny you should use the word "evangelist" because it's Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin's first novel (and, in my opinion, his best). Before I went to graduate school I, perhaps like most other people, was more familiar with Baldwin the essayist. So after I read this book in Ayana Mathis's class, and after I understood how impeccable it is in its structure and voice, I started teaching portions of it in my own fiction classes.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I don't know that I've ever bought a book solely because of the cover, but I do remember, months before it was out, adoring the look of Luster by Raven Leilani. Love the iridescence and the colors, and that, although it takes you a moment to recognize exactly what you're looking at, you can tell from the unmistakable texture of the hair and the specific sheen of the skin that the woman deconstructed is Black.
Book you hid from your parents:
I gobbled up those V.C. Andrews novels with the money my mother gave me at B. Dalton or Waldenbooks, but she never asked too much what they were about. That's probably because the covers were fake-outs, featuring angelic-looking teenage white girls peeking through peepholes of gothic mansions or whatever. Little did Mama know the dark and unsettling stuff on the inside.
Book that changed your life:
I have to mention two here, because life changes more than once! Reading Their Eyes Were Watching God at age 14 showed me a reflection of myself in Janie, a dreamy young Black woman coming of age in North Florida, and I also saw myself in Zora Neale Hurston's code-switching between the more formal prose of the narration (aka what I spoke in school) and the AAVE of the dialogue (what I spoke among family). To have that reflection was affirming and showed me what wonderful things language could do. And decades later, the oral history about Saturday Night Live--Live from New York by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller--thrilled me in its scope and style, and inspired me in part to use oral history as the form for my own pop-culture-obsessed book.
Favorite line from a book:
My most memorable reading experiences are about the sum of many beautiful parts, so it was tough to pluck from my brain one single, shimmering line. But one that I greatly admire, for its precision, tone and the hard work it does in establishing an unreliable narrator is the opening line of Adam Haslett's collection You Are Not a Stranger Here (from the story "Notes to My Biographer"): "Two things to get straight from the beginning: I hate doctors and have never joined a support group in my life."
Five books you'll never part with:
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson and Caucasia by Danzy Senna, just because I love both of them so much. Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, signed by the author during her first visit back to the Iowa Writers' Workshop since she left in the 1970s. A first-edition copy of Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, gifted by a friend when I graduated. And my signed galley copy of The Water Dancer, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and featuring cover art by Calida Rawles (both longtime friends).
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Everyone in it is trash, but whew--I gasped from the first page to the last.