Lucinda Roy Books In Order

Publication Order of The Dreambird Chronicles Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Lucinda Roy
Lucinda Roy is a memoirist, novelist, and poet. She has worked in the UK, the US, and West Africa, and her passions include teaching, writing, and (when all else fails) laughing until it hurts. Her Black Jamaican-Maroon dad taught her to love the land their ancestors were taken from, and White English mom taught her biracial offspring to “dance like trees” on Clapham Common.

“Lady Moses” was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her poetry collection, called “The Humming Birds” won the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize.

Lucinda’s a Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, and she gives presentations and keynotes on racism and race, creative writing, diversity, education, and campus safety.

Lucinda’s favorite part about being a writer is getting to invent new worlds to live in. whether they are embedded in realism or speculation, the characters in these worlds have the capacity of inspire or empower, as they had created themselves and had absolutely nothing to do with Lucinda. She cannot think of anything that she would rather do than write. Well maybe eat and sleep, possibly even lie on a beach with a strawberry daiquiri.

Ji-ji, the enslaved, biracial protagonist “The Freedom Race”, would not leave Lucinda alone. She kept prodding her in the back and ordering Lucinda to tell her story. Lucinda’s focused on historical slavery in her poetry, paintings, political commentaries, and keynotes. Yet she wanted to take a look into the future this time around and imagine how slavery would most likely reconfigure itself in an age plagued by other crises (labor shortages, climate change, social unrest, and pandemics).

Lucinda also wanted to do something else, something daring and grand. Something that only speculative fiction would allow. She wanted to reclaim myth and infuse it with something both real and magical, something that was powerful enough to challenge suffering. Lucinda’s editor describes the novel as being a story of resurrection and race. And she’s right. She figures she wrote “The Freedom Race” to learn what those that trace their lineage back through slavery have got the power to reclaim.

“Lady Moses” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 1998. The story of Jacinta Moses, the child of a courageous and passionate love. Simon Moses, her dad, is a black African writer; while her mom, named Louise, is a white British actress. Together the family carves out their vibrant life in South London that is filled with people drawn to Simon’s powerful tales about the Africa he left behind.

However when Simon Moses died, Jacinta’s mom descends into madness, leaving her daughter alone and impoverished. Her only real friend now is Alfred Russell-Smyth, an unemployed thespian. Jacinta longs for a better life, to surround herself with beauty, and to run “wide, high, and deep”. While she grows older, though, prejudice (her own along with that of other people) leads her to make adventurous yet damaging decisions in her life.

In her quest for security and happiness, Jacinta flees to the American South and she marries a white man. However when Lady, her daughter, is born with a disability, which ruins her hopes to have a picture perfect life, she travels to Africa with her husband and baby to look for answers in her dad’s homeland. Her experiences while here change her forever, since it’s in Africa, a land which echoes with her dad’s tales, that she’s forced to drawn upon her family great strengths and weave something brilliant out of their painful history.

This is a novel about being white and black. Yet it’s less about issues than it is about passionate characters in extraordinary situations, about how a woman employs her creativity, strength, and intelligence in order to forge an identity.

“The Hotel Alleluia” is the second stand alone novel and was released in 2000. Joan’s quest to locate her sister after their mom’s death sets off a series of crazy events in Africa. These reunited sisters join forces with the unlikely duo of Joan’s former lover (Gordon Delacroix) and a troubled English writer (Jeremy Scott).

The days that they spend together in the bloodshed and violence of a disintegrating nation change each of them forever and force them to reevaluate what’s meant by identity, faith, and love.

“The Freedom Race” is the first novel in the “Dreambird Chronicles” and was released in 2021. In the aftermath of the cataclysmic civil war that is known as the Sequel, ideological divisions among the states have hardened. In the Homestead Territories, this alliance of plantation-inspired holdings, Black labor is imported from the Cradle, and these Biracial “Muleseeds” are bred.

Raised captivity on Planting 437, kitchen-seed jellybean “Ji-ji” Lottermule knows that there’s just one way to escape. She has to enter into the annual Freedom Race as a runner.

Ji-ji and her friends have to exhume a survival story that is rooted in the collective memory of this kidnapped people and conjure up the voices of the dead in order to light their way home.

The future Lucinda’s calling up in this novel is an unsettling and fierce riff on our present and past. And instead of just watching democracy evaporate and justice fail, Ms. Roy challenges everybody to get over ourselves and join in the race for freedom.

“Flying the Coop” is the second novel in the “Dreambird Chronicles” series and was released in 2022. Dreams are promises that your imagination makes to itself.

In the disunited states, no person of color, particularly not a girl whose body reimagines flight, is ever safe. A quest for Freedom has brought former Muleseed Jellybean “Ji-ji” Silapu to D.C. (aka Dream City), the site of memorials and monuments, where, long ago, the most famous Dreamer there was marched for the same exact cause.

While Ji-ji struggles to come to grips with her stunning metamorphosis and her friends, Afarra and Tiro, battle against formidable ghosts of their own, the once US capital decides whose dreams it wants to invest more into and whose dreams they’ll defer. The journeys that these three friends take in order to liberate themselves and other people are not going to simply defy the status quo, but will also challenge the nature of reality itself.