Aftershocks

In her enthralling memoir, Whiting Award-winner Owusu (So Devilish a Fire) assesses the impact of key events in her life via the metaphor of earthquakes … Readers will be moved by this well-wrought memoir.

In reading Aftershocks, I went on an incredible (and moving) journey with a young woman whose past and present play out across Africa, Europe and America. I felt acutely Owusu’s pain and the joy of her self-discovery through her intense and intimate prose. What a moving and beautifully written personal history, one infused with questions of post-colonial identity and the challenge of modern womanhood. I loved the book. I loved her voice.

Nadia Owusu has lived multiple lives. And each has demanded much of her. She has met and surpassed those demands with her memoir, Aftershocks. Owusu is half-Armenian, half-Ghanaian; socially privileged and psychologically wounded. Her task and burden are threefold: to chronicle the historical wounds and legacies of each country; to chart her own descent into grief, mania and madness; to begin the work of emotional reconstruction. She does so with unerring honesty and in prose that is both rigorous and luminous.

MARGO JEFFERSON, author of Negroland: A Memoir

A white-hot interrogation of the stories we carry in our bodies and the power they have to tear us apart. Owusu illuminates the blood and bones wrought by our borders and teaches us the necessity of owning our narratives when personal and collective histories have been shattered by violence.

Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urban planner. Her lyric essay chapbook, So Devilish a Fire, was a winner of The Atlas Review chapbook series and was published in 2019. Nadia grew up in Rome, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Kumasi, and London. By day, she is the director of storytelling at Frontline Solutions, a black-owned consulting firm that helps social-change organizations to define goals, execute plans, and evaluate impact. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, the Washington Post’s The Lily, Orion, the Literary Review, the Paris Review Daily, Catapult, Bon Appetit, and others.

She is a graduate of Pace University (BA), Hunter College (MS), and the Mountainview MFA program where she now teaches and where she won the Robert J. Begeibing Prize for exceptional work.