Donna Hemans
Donna Hemans is the author of two previous novels, River Woman and Tea By the Sea, which won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. She is also the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers based in Washington, DC. Born in Jamaica, she lives in Maryland, and received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an MFA from American University.
After decades of living in Brooklyn, Pearline, the protagonist of Donna Hemans’ The House of Plain Truth, returns to Jamaica to nurse her father through his final days and reclaim her childhood home. Instead, she finds herself at odds with her sisters who view her as an outsider. On his deathbed, her father tasks her with solving the mystery of what happened to the children he was forced to abandon in Cuba while working as a migrant laborer sixty years before. With lyrical, contemplative prose and subtle revelations, The House of Plain Truth deftly unravels the economic and political pressures that complicate a woman's conception of home.