Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen was born Nellie Walker in Chicago in 1891, the daughter of a Danish mother and a father from the Danish West Indies, who disappeared when she was small. Her mother remarried, and Nella grew up as the only Black member of her family, an experience of not belonging that shaped her fiction. As a child she lived in Denmark for three years, and about 1907 she attended the Fisk University Normal School in Nashville. She trained as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital in New York. In 1919 she married the physicist Elmer Imes. She later became the first Black woman to graduate from the New York Public Library's library school and worked as a librarian in Harlem, where she met writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Her novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), about women of mixed ancestry and the color line, were praised by critics. In 1930 she became the first African American woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. She later returned to nursing and died in New York in 1964.

Nella Larsen is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia