Avery Irons

Avery Irons is the author of the novella Glass Men, which won Big Fiction Magazine's Novella Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Sinister Wisdom, the African American Review, and Ragazine.CC. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also holds a Juris Doctor from the Columbia University School of Law. Avery was born and (mostly) raised in central Illinois. She currently lives in upstate New York where she writes historical fiction and speculative fiction (and sometimes a mix of the two), while drinking lots of mugs of tea.

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Featured Work

Belonging To The Air

Honest “Bird” Bennett is a young Black girl with a hunger to learn what lies beyond the walls she shares with her mother, Maddy, and her grandmother, Odelia. Their home resonates with the hum of Maddy’s sewing machine, echoes of Bird preparing supper, and Odelia’s stories of times past. The women live in Bennettsville, Illinois, a freedmen’s town established by Bird’s great-grandfather, where rural life pulses with church song and where peace is fragile with the neighboring white town, Tuckersville. As Bird comes of age, she must reckon with turbulence at home and with what it means to fall in love with a childhood friend. As an adult, rejecting a life of self-denial, Bird spreads her wings and finds a new home in Harlem. After a decade of growth and loss, she is summoned back to Bennettsville to confront her kin and her past as Tuckersville residents try to drive Black families from their own land.

Belonging to the Air: A Novel follows one family’s intergenerational experience of the Great Migration. Among the novel’s cast of characters are a blind matriarch, women who heal with herbs, and queer lovers. Irons’s evocative and lyrical prose imagines a world in which these complicated characters try to care for one another in a country that does not care about them. History talks to and through itself as elders confront youngsters and as racism shapeshifts in rural and urban settings across the decades. With dialogue that jumps off the page and rings with a truth that lingers, Belonging to the Air urges readers to think about how constructions of race, love, and freedom have―and have not―changed over time, demanding that we consider the wisdom of our inner selves while we listen to that of our elders.

Buy At The Kimilio Bookshop

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Five Questions for AVERY IRONS

• Who/What Inspired You Most When Writing BELONGING TO THE AIR?

  I wanted to write (and read) a post-reconstruction story about Blacks in the U.S. Great Migration who settled in the Midwest. And I wanted to recreate and understand the experiences of Black queer folks during this time period outside of the Harlem Renaissance. Those people who were like my family: sharecroppers, teachers, seamstresses moving forward and loving the best they could in a hostile world.

• What came first for you—setting, plot, characters? How did this help you develop the rest of the story?

  Character came first. The story started with Bird, and then she told me about Bennettsville and her “situations” with Bessie and Leah.

• Pick three words to describe your writing process for BELONGING TO THE AIR.

  Patient! Loving. And (mostly) joyous.

• What's on the menu for your book publication celebration dinner?

  It’s got to be soul food. Roasted chicken, okra, collard greens (with hot sauce and vinegar). The centerpiece will definitely be baked macaroni and cheese. Oh, and sweet potato pie and banana pudding.

• Which teacher are you most excited to share the news about your new book and why?

  I’m most excited to share the news and copy with Dr. Juliet E. K. Walker, my African American History professor during my undergraduate studies. Her early research on the freedmen’s town her grandfather started in Illinois always stuck with me and helped me envision Bennettsville- a key location in the book. And it turns out her first scholarly monograph was also published by the same Press.