DAWN TURNER

Author of
Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood (Simon and Schuster, 2021)
An Eighth of August (Crown/RandomHouse, 2000)
Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven (Crown/RandomHouse, 1997)

Dawn Turner’s most recent book, Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood was called “unmissable” by Vogue and “Poignant and nuanced” by Ms. Magazine. Three Girls from Bronzeville was named a Notable book of 2021 by The New York Times Book Review, and a Best Book of 2021 by The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Buzzfeed, The Library Journal, Real Simple, and Hudson Booksellers, among others. Dawn is a former columnist for the Chicago Tribune and has twice served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary. She has written commentary for The Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, CBS Sunday Morning News show, NPR’s Morning Edition show, the Chicago Tonight show, and elsewhere. She has held fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, and in 2018 established the Dawn M. Turner and Kim D. Turner Endowed Scholarship in Media at her alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Twitter / Instagram / Facebook / Represented by Ayesha Pande

Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood (Simon & Schuster, 2021)

Notable Book of 2021, New York Times Book Review
Best Book of 2021, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Buzzfeed, The Library Journal, Real Simple, and Hudson Booksellers

A story of three girls who start out in virtually the same place and wind up taking three dramatically different paths.

An Eighth of August (Crown/RandomHouse, 2000)

The story of a Black family that celebrates Kentucky’s equivalent to Juneteenth.

Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven (Crown/RandomHouse, 1997)

In 1975, Tempestt Saville, 11, and her family are chosen by lottery to “move on up” to Lakeland: one square mile of sparkling apartment towers where the Black elite live sheltered from the ghetto by a ten-foot-tall, ivy-covered wrought-iron fence. Tempestt’s curiosity soon leads her down a dangerous path, however, and after witnessing the death of a friend, she sets into motion a chain of events that will send 35th Street up in flames.