Angela Flournoy is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Turner House, winner of the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, an NAACP Image Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction; and The Wilderness, a finalist for the 2025 Kirkus Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award that was also longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. A National Book Foundation “5 under 35” Honoree, Flournoy skillfully illuminates universal themes of home, family and friendship through unforgettable characters, finely-wrought prose and subtle humor.

Alongside such writers as Jesmyn Ward and Tayari Jones, Flournoy is part of a powerful generation of Black women reshaping American literature by redefining who stands at its center. Hailed as a literary anthropologist in the tradition of Philip Roth, she brings a keen sense of empathy and a pitch-perfect ear for authentic voices to stories of ordinary people confronting personal change against the backdrop of political and social upheaval.

“With warmth and incisiveness, Angela Flournoy writes about what it means to come from a place—what it means to leave it, to return to it, and to carry it with you. The Turner House is both intimate and epic, a novel deeply attuned to the moments that make a life and the histories that shape a community.”—National Book Award Judges Citation, Fiction Category

Flournoy’s breakout debut The Turner House, was named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets including NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Essence and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Spanning Detroit’s history from the Great Migration to the present day, the novel traces the story of thirteen siblings grappling with their family legacy, their changing city, and their crumbling childhood home. Drawing a vibrant, multigenerational portrait of African American life in the 20th century Flournoy says, “If I was working against any existing Detroit narrative, it is the one where working-class black people exist as numbers or victims and not as fully-realized, complex people…Any realistic depiction of Detroit should include the blight and frustration that come with living there, but it should also show regular people experiencing joy.”

Her novel The Wilderness explores the lives of five Black women over the course of a twenty-year friendship—from the late 2000s to into the late 2020s—as they navigate careers, marriage, and motherhood amid amid the tumult of modern American life. “Flournoy has delivered a future classic,” wrote Harpers Bazaar, “the kind of novel that generations to come will read to understand the nuances and peculiarities of this time.” A finalist for the 2025 Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, The Wilderness examines how chosen families form and fracture, and what it means to grow alongside the people we love.

“Here is the novel I’m always waiting for, one which captures and explains and deepens the world around me.” — Justin Torres, author of Blackouts

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Flournoy has held fellowships from the NEA, the Cullman Center, and the American Academy in Berlin. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.

For more information on Angela Flournoy, please visit her on Instagram and at https://www.angelaflournoy.com