Tiphanie Yanique

Early life

Yanique’s maternal roots are in the Virgin Islands. She is a member of the Smith (of St. Thomas and Tortola) and Galiber (of St. Thomas and St. Croix) families. Paternally, she is also a member of the Giraud family originally of Dominica. She was raised in the Hospital Ground neighborhood of St. Thomas by her grandparents, Beulah Smith Harrigan (former children’s librarian of the St. Thomas Enid Baa Library and youngest child of Captain Smith of the Fancy Me) and Delvin Harrigan (former fireman and taxi dispatcher). Her biological grandfather was Dr. Andre Galiber of St. Croix.

Yanique attended Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Elementary School and graduated from All Saints Episcopal High School in 1996. In 2000, she earned her undergraduate degree from Tufts University in Massachusetts. Shortly after graduating, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in Literatures in English and Creative Writing at The University of the West Indies for which she conducted research on Caribbean women writers, such as Merle Hodge and Erna Brodber in Trinidad and Tobago. She went on to receive her Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Houston in 2006 where she held a Cambor Fellowship.

Teaching

In 2006, after receiving her Cambor Fellowship, Yanique served as the 2006-07 Writer-in Residence/Parks Fellow at Rice University, teaching creative writing, fiction and nonfiction, and working as the faculty editor of The Rice Review literary magazine.

From 2007 to 2011, she taught undergraduate and graduate writing and teaching courses as an assistant professor of creative writing and Caribbean literature at Drew University—during which time she also worked as an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine (2007–08) and an associate editor Post No Ills Magazine (2008–11), as well as the director of writing and curriculum at the Virgin Islands Summer Writers Program (2008-2011).

She is currently an assistant professor of writing at The New School where she teaches undergraduate and graduate students.

Writing

Yanique’s debut collection How to Escape a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories was published by Graywolf Press in 2010, and has since received praise from The Caribbean Review of Books, The Boston Globe, and O, The Oprah Magazine among other journals. Her children’s picture book I am the Virgin Islands was published in December 2012 by Little Bell Caribbean/Campanita Books, and was commissioned by the First Lady of the Virgin Islands as a gift to the children of the Virgin Islands. Yanique’s husband, photographer Moses Djeli, created the images for the book. Her short fiction, essays and poetry have appeared Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, Best African American Fiction, Transition Magazine, American Short Fiction, The London Magazine, Prism International, Callaloo, Boston Review, and other journals and anthologies.

Her novel Land of Love and Drowning was published by Riverhead Books in 2014, and was described by Publishers Weekly as "an affecting narrative of the Virgin Islands that pulses with life, vitality, and a haunting evocation of place".

Awards and accolades

In 2016 Yanique's first poetry collection, Wife, won the Forward Prize's Felix Dennis Prize for best new collection.

She won the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize for her novel, Land of Love and Drowning and the monthly book review publication, BookPage, listed her as one of the 14 Women to Watch Out for in 2014.

In 2011, Yanique won the BOCAS Fiction Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the National Book Foundation recognized her as one of their 5 under-35 honorees, an award that celebrates five young fiction writers selected by past National Book Award Winners and Finalists. She was one of the three writers awarded the 2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for fiction, along with Helen Phillips and Lori Ostlund.

She is also the winner of a 2008 Pushcart Prize for her short story the "The Bridge Stories", the 2007 Kore Press Short Fiction Award for her short story "The Saving Work", and the 2006 Boston Review Fiction Prize for her short story “How to Escape from a Leper Colony”. She received The Academy of American Poets Prize in 2000 and has had residencies with Bread Loaf, Callaloo, Squaw Valley and the Cropper Foundation for Caribbean Writers.

At the 2016 Forward Prizes for Poetry she won the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection for her 2015 book Wife, about which chair of judges Malika Booker said: "Tiphanie Yanique's Wife is above all a generous and witty book, an agile exploration of the many relationships within marriage. She has written a delightful exploration of the tensions and complexity of matrimony, in language that’s deceptively simple."

Personal life

Yanique currently lives in New Rochelle, New York with her husband and three children.