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words by Annika Hoiem photos by Codie Yan
SU professor Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah recently published his first book, a New York Times bestseller that tackles racism, materialism, zombies, and serial killers, while still managing to be hopeful.
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ana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah began his fight against society’s ills in his childhood backyard. Alongside his younger sister and two neighbors, Adjei-Brenyah started calling himself the Guardian of Light, a warrior sent to save the world from destruction. The kids would pluck the names of their enemies from a dictionary, searching for something life-threatening and unimaginably terrible to conquer. Adjei-Brenyah’s desire to vanquish the hydras of fear, racism, and stigma only grew with age. Today, he’s in his office sipping tea out of a Late Night with Seth Meyers mug, the handle broken. He laughs at the irony. He appeared on the show on December 18, alongside Amy Adams and Stephan James of If Beale Street Could Talk. Adjei-Brenyah joined the ranks of only 17 novelists to speak on Meyers, as opposed to hundreds of actors and musicians. A framed copy of the New York Times bestseller list hangs on his wall, his first book, Friday Black, listed at number 13. He points to the frame. “Luckily, with this book, I did have a crazy amount of good things happen,” he says. Though he acknowledges a Pulitzer would be nice, he doesn’t believe these external validations contribute to any sort of true joy. After completing his M.F.A. in fiction at SU in 2016, Adjei-Brenyah signed a book deal for a collection of short stories (then How to Sell a Jacket, now Friday Black). His debut collection, released in October, became an instant New York Times