Tyriek Rashawn White
Tyriek Rashawn White is a writer, musician, and educator from Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of the novel, We Are A Haunting (Astra House, 2023), winner of The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was long-listed for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize. He has received fellowships from Callaloo and the New York State Writer’s Institute, among other honors. He is currently the media director of Lampblack Literary Foundation, which seeks to provide mutual aid and various resources to Black writers across the diaspora. He holds a degree in Creative Writing & Africana Studies from Pitzer College and most recently earned an MFA from the University of Mississippi.
Tyriek White is the 2023 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize winner for his debut We Are a Haunting. Set in East New York, Brooklyn, the novel follows Colly, a teen growing up in public housing who is left under the guardianship of an absent father when his mother dies from cancer. But since Key and Colly possess the same supernatural ability to see and communicate with the dead, they continue their bond even after her death. The novel alternates between Key's life in New York in the eighties and nineties and Colly’s from the early 2000s to the present day. White elegantly uses Key and Colly’s communion with ghosts to contextualize present-day fights against the gentrification of Black and brown communities and the city's systematic neglect of public housing within a larger history of Black displacement and forced migration in the Western world.