Yaa Gyasi

About Yaa Gyasi

Yaa Gyasi was born in 1989 in Mampong, Ghana, the daughter of a French professor and a nurse. Her family moved to the United States when she was two, eventually settling in Huntsville, Alabama, when she was ten. She earned a degree in English from Stanford University and later an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, resigning from a tech-industry job in San Francisco to attend. She has said the idea for her debut novel took shape after a trip to Ghana, where she visited Cape Coast Castle, a former holding site in the transatlantic slave trade.

That visit became the seed of Homegoing (2016), which follows two half sisters and their descendants across three centuries, one line remaining in Ghana and the other carried into American slavery. Published when Gyasi was 26, the novel won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award, and the American Book Award, and named her to the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" list. Her second novel, Transcendent Kingdom (2020), follows a Stanford neuroscience student navigating her family's migration from Ghana to Alabama alongside grief and addiction.

Why Homegoing Has Been Challenged

Objections to Homegoing center on its graphic depictions of the violence of slavery, including scenes of physical brutality and sexual assault set in the dungeons of Cape Coast Castle and on the plantations that follow later chapters. Some challenges frame this content as too disturbing for school-age readers, while others tie it to broader disputes over how American classrooms should teach the history of race and slavery. The book has been challenged or restricted in 10 states and 29 districts tracked in this catalog, a record that reflects how contested that history remains in American schools even as Homegoing continues to be widely assigned as an entry point into it.