DeLana R.A. Dameron Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Poetry Collections

Publication Order of Southern Classics Books

DéLana R.A. Dameron
DéLana R.A. Dameron is an artist whose primary medium is storytelling. “Redwood Court” was a Reese’s Book Club Pick and a New York Times Editor’s Pick.

DéLana is a graduate of New York University’s MFA program in poetry and holds a bachelor of arts degree in history from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

“How God Ends Us” was picked by Elizabeth Alexander for the 2008 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, and “Weary Kingdom” was selected by Nikky Finney for the Palmetto Poetry Series.

Her work has appeared in the Kweli Journal, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as other places.

For “Redwood Court”, she has this collection of six Moleskine notebooks that make up her brainstorms, drafts of the novel. This includes character bios and the overall synopsis, notes from her agent and editor. She wrote anywhere she had a moment to sit down and dream and remember and imagine.

DéLana had begun writing the novel during her time living in Brooklyn. She moved back to Columbia, South Carolina at the end of 2019, and part of her reorientation became remembering. And writing. She returned to a nearly empty homeland, since by that time, her dad had passed. Both of her grandparents are long gone. Her mom was unable to move or speak because of a severe stroke numerous years before that. So writing “Redwood Court” comforted her. She couldn’t go to her grandparents’ house physically, however she could write a world where both it, and she, and for a while her grandpa, still existed.

She thought quite a lot about place as she wrote the novel. More specifically, how the Black experience in contemporary culture is typically a tale of dichotomy: rural vs. urban. Underresourced vs. resourced. It was important for her to locate the novel in an existing and real place.

Redwood Court is a real street in a real town. While she grew up in the 1990s, the people that loved her made that one street feel a lot like a small town. And because of the ways that infrastructure ruled the movement of Black life, the neighborhood in which the court was located did operate a lot like a small town, this collection of safe spaces to do business, gather, and so on.

Zora Neale Hurston’s attention to rural Southern Black people and staying true to how she represents them is like a North Star for DéLana. “Sula” by Toni Morrison is a book that she returns to over and over. “Going to Meet the Man” by James Baldwin is too. The year that she started writing “Redwood Court”, Kerry James Marshall had this huge exhibit at the Met.

“How God Ends Us” is a poetry collection that was released in 2012. Poetic conversations with a God whose omnipotence brings uncertainty and peace.

DéLana seeks answers to spiritual quandaries in her debut poetry collection. Her poems form this lyrical conversation with an omnipotent and ominous deity, one that controls all matters of living earth, which includes destruction and death.

The poet’s acknowledgment of the breadth of such a power under divine jurisdiction moves her by turns to grief, anger, celebration, and even joy. From personal to collective to imagined histories, her poems explore perennial and essential questions emblemized by natural disasters, racism, family struggles, and the experiences of travel abroad.

Even though she reaches for conclusions which can’t be unveiled, her investigations exhibit the creative act of poetry as a source of resolution and consolation.

“Weary Kingdom” is a poetry collection that was released in 2017. One Southern born poet’s journey of pilgrimage and reflection to the streets of Harlem.

This time, she maps a journey across spiritual, emotional, and geographic lines, from the familiarity of the honeysuckle South to a brand new world, or new kingdom: Harlem.

Her poems traverse the streets of this here Black mecca with a careful eye being cast toward the intimacies of the exterior. Still, while the poems move throughout the built environment, they navigate matters of love, death, love loss, and family against the backdrop of a city which has yet to become a home.

Indeed what looms over such a weary kingdom is a longing for the certainties of a lover’s touch, the comforts of a promised land up North, and the summer sun. And while the poet longs, so do the readers. They ultimately grow aware of Utopia’s fragility.

“Redwood Court” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2024. A brilliant and nuanced debut novel about an unforgettable Southern Black family and its youngest daughter’s coming of age during the 1990s.

Mika Tabor, the baby of the family, spends a lot of her time in loved ones’ care, witnessing their struggles and listening to their stories. On Redwood Court, the cul-de-sac in the all Black working-class suburbs of Columbia, South Carolina, where her grandparents live, she learns some important lessons from the people raising her: her exhausted parents, who are working long hours at multiple jobs as they make sure their children experience the adventure of family vacations. Her elder sister, who in a house full of Motown would much rather listen to Alanis Morrisette. Her retired grandparents, the kids of Jim Crown, who realized their own version of success once they bought their house on the Court back during the 1960s, imagining it full of future generations.

And all of the numerous neighbors that hold tight to the community that they have built, committed to fostering love and joy in an America so insistent on seeing Black folks fall and stumble.

With powerful prose and visceral clarity, DéLana reveals the devastation of being made to feel invisible and the transformative power of being seen. This novel is a celebration of extraordinary, ordinary people that strive to achieve their own American dreams.

She expertly weaves threads of grit, grace, and grief into this tapestry which captures the beauty of not only one particular family yet family in general. Here is a novel that is a heartrending celebration of the ties that bind, and a poetic one at that.