Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis was born in Philadelphia to a long line of formidable women. As an only child, a quirky and overactive imagination was inevitable, and at the age of eight she penned her first collection of short stories about a girl named Blue who came to a bad end in a tree house.

Many years passed before she rediscovered that focus and dedication - in the meantime Ayana worked as a waitress, a freelance researcher, a magazine journalist, and spent five years living in Italy.

In 2011 she received an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and is a recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. She currently lives in Brooklyn (she knows that lots of other writers live in Brooklyn, but she lived there first.) The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is her first novel.