Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis is on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Hunter College, CUNY. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she became the first African American woman to become an assistant professor in that program. Her most recent novel, The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023), was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023 and a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, and Kirkus. Her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012), was a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Mathis’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Guernica, and the Financial Times, among others, and she has received support from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. Mathis read at Vanderbilt on October 29, 2026. This pop-up exhibit was inspired by The Unsettled.