10 July 4–10, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Balancing the Books Author Sanderia Faye is quietly building Dallas’ literary community. BY VANESSA QUILANTAN W hen Sanderia Faye was a little girl growing up in the small rural prison town of Gould, Arkansas, she preferred spending her time following her high-school-aged aunt Earnestine around rather than playing outside with her many cousins. She’d sit quietly in the house like a fly on the wall, trying to remain inconspicuous while closely observing her aunt and friends. Faye was mature for her age and always wanted to know what the grown-ups were talking about. “She was playful,” says Faye of her aunt and personal hero. “She was always telling me to do crazy things, and I was gullible enough to believe that [I should].” One day, to shoo her away, Earnestine told her young niece that if she went outside, put a feather in her hair and jumped off the family smokehouse out back, she’d be able to fly. Faye rushed outside to pluck a feather from a black hen, climbed up to the roof and took the leap. She broke a limb when she hit the ground. Faye’s family and vast community of locals always knew she was special. They held her to a higher standard than the other children, encouraging her to aim high. So she wanted to touch the sky. And to this day, Faye reckons that her aunt truly believed she could fly. In many ways, Faye grew up to soar far beyond the Delta. Now in middle age, Sanderia Faye is an award-winning novelist and champion community builder on the Dallas literary scene. She holds three advanced degrees (an M.F.A. from Arizona State University, another from the University of Texas at Dallas and a Ph.D. in English with an emphasis in African American literature and creative writing from Southern Methodist University). She serves as executive director of the Dallas Literary Festival and co-chair of PEN America’s local chapter, is the founding host of the popular reading series LitNight, co- founder of the Kimbilio Center for Black Fiction and sits on the advisory board for buzzworthy nonprofit Deep Vellum Publishing. Faye is also certified by the Court of Master Sommeliers, informing her expertise in pairing fine wines with books. She envisions one day writing from a vineyard of her own. But for now, she works from a home office to the music of Tupac and Seal from playlists she compiles to represent the themes and characters of her projects. Though she considers herself a writer first and foremost, Faye’s upbringing in a small and tight-knit town drove her passion for community building since arriving in Dallas in 2009. “And I think that may be when I found myself,” she says, reflecting on the start of her advocacy work in Texas. “Writing and creating, that’s what felt like home to me. I was in the right place for that [when I came to Dallas]. What I didn’t know was that I would find being a professor and an executive director for the literary festival to be as equally rewarding. “So that part is service. I say that writing is my passion, and service is my purpose.” This purpose serves many, notes Deep Vellum founder Will Evans. “Sanderia is a consummate literary citizen, an extraordinarily talented writer, an inspiring professor, a literary programmer who sees a need in the community and acts to fill it, an advocate to ensure the full diversity of writers and readers are connected,” Evans says. “So much of what makes literary Dallas special is thanks to Sanderia’s vision and hard work.” An Early Love of Reading In another effort to get her niece out of her hair from time to time, Aunt Earnestine taught Faye to read from the Bible at the age of 3, and on Saturdays, she would read it aloud to her beloved great-grandmother. After that introduction to the written word, Faye became a loner and spent most of her free time with her nose in a book, feeling like an outsider in the town of Gould. “If my parents wanted something read, they would call me to read it to them,” Faye says. “Even if something was going on, I was always able to do my homework before my chores or anything like that. My education was always stressed [as important].” After the Bible, she fell in love with Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She saw herself in the tale’s protagonist, also a young girl coming of age in Arkansas, and that representation of her own world is something that stayed with Faye throughout her life. After high school, she took a job in a factory, as did most of her peers who opted not to work at the nearby Arkansas state prison. But she was encouraged once again to take flight, this time by her great- grandmother. “She said, ‘I don’t think this factory thing is for you. I think you should go to that thing they call college,’” Faye recalls. “I think it was always suspected that I would do something different rather than live in the small town.” But Faye wasn’t nudged by her family to pursue her true passion for literature. They wanted her to succeed in a more professional and lucrative field. So Faye went to school and earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting, after learning that financial auditors could travel the world for work. For many years, that’s what she did, building a successful career that eventually led her to an executive sales and marketing position in the pharmaceutical industry, and then into the corporate world via a Fortune 500 company that brought her to Dallas. But Faye grew restless in corporate America. After finding inspiration from Oprah Winfrey’s late-’90s TV specials on the power of following one’s dreams, she eventually decided to go all-in on her literary passion, meeting with a career counselor for guidance. “She told me that going from a business career to becoming a writer would be like turning a large ship around in the ocean,” Faye says. She didn’t let that stop her. “It’s not that I’ve ever set out to prove anyone wrong,” Faye says. “It’s that once I have my mind made up, I’m not just going to stop because of what someone else thinks, because they’re only seeing you from their own lens, not as you really are. No one can really tell you what you can and cannot accomplish.” She had her mind made up to become a writer and decided to start from the ground up by balancing her business career with a return to school to earn her post-graduate humanities degrees. And that’s when she started writing. In the academic world, she rarely found a seat at the table for aspiring Black authors like herself. But any time her self-doubt kicked in, she again found hope in Angelou’s seminal work. “As an African American woman from the South, I had to go out and find someone like me who had done it, and done it at a high level,” Faye says. “So I would carry I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in my book bag. And when I would feel that sense of, ‘I will never do this. I can’t make it. I’m gonna quit,’ I would look at that book and I would think that she had it much more difficult than I did. And there she was, she had found [her way].” Though she had no idea what to do with it, Faye had completed the earliest draft of her novel Mourner’s Bench by 2001. But with the 2007 housing market crash, her life was turned upside down. She was fired from her corporate middle-management job and was forced to spend time focused on her health after being diagnosed with a serious chronic illness. Once she recovered, she spent a few years in Florida hoping to find solace by the ocean and to focus on her writing. But because she’s never been the type to sit and write without anything else to keep her busy, she took a seasonal civilian job with the Navy, where she spent eight-week Nathan Hunsinger Sanderia Faye is an award-winning novelist. ▼ Culture >> p12
