Black Landscapes: The Millions Interviews M Shelly Conner
M Shelly Conner’s debut novel everyman, out now in paperback from Blackstone, tells the story of Eve Mann, whose quest to learn about her past launches a multigenerational story set against the backdrop of the American South and the Great Migration. A temporally vast exploration of identity, inheritance, and liberation, everyman puts Conner in conversation with such literary forebearers as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. We talked with Conner about the journey to publication, the personal inspiration behind the book, and negotiating the oft-competing demands of academia and literature.
The Millions: What was the genesis of everyman? Can you walk us through the journey from the novel’s inception to its publication?
My mother, a retired Chicago public librarian, has always been a curator of our family history and stories. Collecting everything from obituaries to census records, she’s traced our maternal ancestry back to the early 1800s. I’ve always felt an incredible sense of pride in the repository of information that as my dissertation during my PhD program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It took an additional three years of revisions before I secured an agent, but it was acquired by a publisher rather quickly.
