Overview

"A groundbreaking study of the first Black female novelist and her life as an enslaved woman, from the biographer who solved the mystery of her identity, with a preface by Henry Louis Gates Jr. In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York. In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death. The novel, The Bondwoman's Narrative, was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author's identity remained unknown. Over a decade later, Professor Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the author's name and, in The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, he finally tells her story. In this remarkable biography, Hecimovich identifies the novelist as Hannah Bond ""Crafts."" She was not only the first known Black woman to compose a novel but also an extraordinarily gifted artist who honed her literary skills in direct opposition to a system designed to deny her every measure of humanity. After escaping to New York, the author forged a new identity--as Hannah Crafts--to make sense of a life fractured by slavery. Hecimovich establishes the case for authorship of The Bondwoman's Narrative by examining the lives of Hannah Crafts's friends and contemporaries, including the five enslaved women whose experiences form part of her narrative. By drawing on the lives of those she knew in slavery, Crafts summoned into her fiction people otherwise stolen from history. At once a detective story, a literary chase, and a cultural history, The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts discovers a tale of love, friendship, betrayal, and violence set against the backdrop of America's slide into Civil War."

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Gregg Hecimovich is a professor and chair of the Department of English at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. He received his PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. He is the author of three previous books and has received fellowships from the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard and the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Additionally, Hecimovich held a Public Scholar Fellowship appointment from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife and their two daughters. Janina Edwards, a graduate of New York University's Tisch Schools of the Arts, recorded her first audiobook in 1987. She was born in Chicago, soaked in New York City's African and West Indian accents for 11 years, and for the past twenty years has swum in the swagger of the south (Atlanta, Georgia). As a result, she excels in portraying authentic characters and voices the African Diaspora. Her 2018 audiobook, The Wedding Date, is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner, and Voice of Freedom (2016, Dreamscape) was an Audie Award finalist. In addition to narrating audiobooks, she is a certified yoga teacher, sings kirtan, and plays the violin. Ron Butler is a Los Angeles based actor who works regularly as a commercial and animation voiceover artist and an audiobook narrator. A member of the Atlantic Theater Company, he has over a hundred film and television credits to his name and won an Independent Filmmaker Project Award for his work in the HBO film Everyday People.

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