Honoree Fanonne Jeffers's The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is an epic novel tracing an African American family from the colonial era to the present. Ailey Pearl Garfield, a young woman coming of age in the contemporary Northeast, gradually learns her family's history, which unfolds in alternating chapters set in Georgia across centuries. The novel depicts the Creeks and enslaved Africans who first inhabited the land, the violence of slavery and its aftermath, the struggles of the Jim Crow era, and the ongoing reckoning with this past. Jeffers, an acclaimed poet, brings poetic attention to language and image. The book is long and densely layered, with dozens of characters across generations. Jeffers does not soften the brutality of history, but she also celebrates the resilience, love, and art that Black communities created under impossible conditions. The title alludes to Du Bois's work on African American culture, and the novel can be read as a fictional complement to sociological and historical scholarship. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois won widespread acclaim and was long-listed for the Booker Prize. Essential reading for anyone interested in the African American experience or the possibilities of the historical novel.