Yaa Gyasi Biography
Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-American novelist. He started her debut novel and worked for a startup company in San Francisco. Her debut novel, Homegoing, was published in 2016.
Yaa Gyasi Age
Yaa Gyasi Education
She received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Stanford University and a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a creative writing school at the University of Iowa.
Yaa Gyasi Parents- Brother
Born in Mampong, Ghana, she is the daughter of Kwaku Gyasi, a French professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and Sophia, a nurse. Her family relocated to the United States in 1991, while her father was pursuing his Ph.D. at Ohio State University. Gyasi’s family also lived in Illinois and Tennessee before moving to Huntsville, Alabama, when he was 10 years old.
Is Yaa Gyasi Married?- Husband
She is confidential when it comes to matters concerning her personal life. She has not yet shared her relationship or marital status with the public.
Yaa Gyasi Career
She began her debut novel shortly after graduating from Stanford and worked at a startup business in San Francisco, but she did not enjoy her job and departed after being accepted to Iowa in 2012. Gyasi’s debut novel Homegoing was inspired by a 2009 journey to Ghana, her first since leaving as an infant. The work was completed in 2015, and following first readings by publishers, she received multiple offers before accepting a seven-figure advance from Knopf. Ta-Nehisi Coates chose Homegoing for the National Book Foundation’s 2016 “5 under 35” prize, and the novel was also chosen for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard prize, the PEN/Hemingway award for best first book, and the American Book Award.
Her work has also featured in periodicals like African American Review, Callaloo, Guernica, The Guardian, and Granta. Gyasi names Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon), Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain), Edward P. Jones (Lost in the City), and Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth) as literary influences. Forbes named Gyasi to its “30 Under 30 List” in 2017. Gyasi’s second book, Transcendent Kingdom, was published in February 2020 by Knopf. Sara Collins of The Guardian hailed it as a “profound follow-up to Homegoing”,USA Today stated “it’s stealthily devastating”, and The Vox, Chicago Review of Books, and The New Republic also reviewed it favorably.
In March 2021, she wrote an essay on “this question of ‘the business of reading’, of how we read, why we read, and what reading does for and to us.” She wrote: “While I do devoutly believe in the power of literature to challenge, to deepen, to change, I also know that buying books by black authors is but a theoretical, grievously belated and utterly impoverished response to centuries of physical and emotional harm.”
Yaa Gyasi Net Worth
Yaa has an estimated net worth of 500 thousand dollars.