Melanated Reader Presents:

Join Crystal and Natashia Deón, author of Grace, on IG Live

12/22/2020 @ 6pm EST

Natashia Deón is a NAACP Image Award Nominee and author of the critically-acclaimed novel, GRACE (Counterpoint Press).  Awarded the 2017 American Library Association's Black Caucus Award for Best Debut Fiction, GRACE was also named a New York Times Top Book 2016, a Kirkus ReviewBest Book of 2016, and a Book Riot, The Root, and Entropy Magazine Favorite Book of 2016.

Founder of REDEEMED, a non-profit that pairs professional writers with those who have been convicted of crimes, Deón is a practicing criminal attorney, law professor, and creative writing professor at UCLA and Otis College of Art & Design. Deón is the mother of two and is the creator of the popular L.A.-based reading series’ Dirty Laundry Lit and The Table.

She has appeared in People Magazine, TIME magazine, and Redbook, with essays in The New York Times, American Short Fiction, Buzzfeed, Lenny, LA Review of Books, The Feminist Wire, Asian American Lit Review and other places. 

Deón was a U.S. Delegate to Armenia in 2017 as part of the U.S. Embassy’s reconciliation project between Turkey and Armenia, in partnership with the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and is a Pamela Krasney Moral Courage Fellow, and has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yale, Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, Prague's Creative Writing Program, Dickinson House in Belgium, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and other places.