Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book of the year, which was named to Amazon.com’s Best Books of 2016 and Kirkus Reviews’ Best Debut Fiction of 2016. Capturing the complexity of gender, class, race, and sexuality in Jamaica, its writing is “as lush as the island itself,” says the Boston Globe. The book is about “women pushed to the edge, Jamaica in all its beauty and fury,” says Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James. Jennifer Senior, book reviewer for the New York Times, describes the novel as a “lithe, artfully-plotted debut.”

Dennis-Benn is a Lambda Literary Award winner and a finalist for the 2016 John Leonard Prize National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the 2017 Young Lions Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Elle, Electric Literature, Ebony, and the Feminist Wire.

She holds an MFA degree in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Lambda, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Two of her stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.

selected bibliography

Here Comes the Sun (2016)

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online resources

Nicole Dennis-Benn’s website
Dennis-Benn interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered
New York Times Interview 
Los Angeles Review of Books Interview

Video: Dennis-Benn at Water Street Bookstore