Books and Books and the Key West Literary Seminar are pleased to welcome Nicole Dennis-Benn to Key West. Dennis-Benn will read from her latest novel PATSY at the store (533 Eaton Street) on Friday June 28th at 7pm. Signing to follow.
PATSY has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist and has been lauded by the New York Times, NPR, Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, Vogue, Vanity Fair, among others.
“PATSY fills a literary void with compassion, complexity and tenderness,” raves Time Magazine; and according to NPR,
“Dennis-Benn is quickly becoming an indispensable novelist, and PATSY is a brave, brilliant triumph of a book.” The National Book Review describes PATSY as “exquisitely written, highly nuanced, and powerful” and Nylon has proclaimed that “[this] stunning second novel only serves to solidify [Dennis-Benn’s] place as one of the finest novelists writing today.” Award-winning author, Alexander Chee, calls PATSY “a stunningly powerful inter-generational novel,” and Man Booker Prize finalist, Chigozie Obioma, deems PATSY as “beautiful, shattering, and deeply affecting.”
Her debut novel, HERE COMES THE SUN, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, won 
the Lambda Literary Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, the New York Times Public Library Young Lions Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and was long-listed for the Dublin Literary Award.
Time Out New York described Dennis-Benn as one of the “few immigrants and first-generation Americans who are putting their stamps on NYC,” and Vice included her in a round-up of immigrant authors “who are making American literature great again.”
Dennis-Benn was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. She is a graduate of St. Andrew High School for Girls and Cornell University; and holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has taught in the writing programs at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, Sarah Lawrence College, and City College; and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Lambda, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Hurston/Wright, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
Dennis-Benn is in Key West to serve as Distinguished Visiting Writer for the Key West Literary Seminar’s Young Writers Studio, a writing program for high school students across Monroe County. The program is designed to highlight Key West’s literary history, give students access to prominent working authors and help them develop and practice key writing skills and techniques. This year’s theme is Island in the Works from James Merrill’s poem of the same name, which he wrote from his Elizabeth Street home in the 1980s.