Divinely Inspired: A Guest Post by Nikesha Elise Williams

By Nikesha Elise Williams / January 28, 2026 at 12:01 am

Survival and family are at the center of this sweeping epic from Nikesha Elise Williams that follows seven generations of Black women and the bonds they form. Read on for an exclusive essay from Nikesha on writing The Seven Daughter of Dupree.

Hardcover $30.00

The Seven Daughters of Dupree: A Novel

By Nikesha Elise Williams

In Stock Online

Hardcover $30.00

From the two-time Emmy Award–winning producer and host of the Black and Published podcast comes a sweeping multi-generational epic following seven generations of Dupree women as they navigate love, loss, and the unyielding ties of family in the tradition of Homegoing and The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois.

Writing The Seven Daughters of Dupree was a fever dream; urgent and divinely inspired.

There are two origin points for this novel. The first is that I wanted to write about a girl who didn’t know her father and used poetry to cope with her unanswered questions. This spark was semi auto-biographical because, while I know my father, we have a tenuous relationship and as a teenager, much like my character Tati, I wrote in verse in an attempt to capture my feelings.

Tati’s angst, frustration, and poems fueled but so much. When she exhausted me, I switched to her mother’s point of view. I wanted to see Nadia with Tati’s father, and I wanted to answer the questions: What happened? Why did he leave?

But there was more than Tati and Nadia who had stories to tell. When I write, I have a very generic outline of what happens next, but I always leave room for play. That play showed up in the form of Tati’s grandmother Gladys. From the very first chapter I ever wrote, she was there with surly quips and sardonic one-liners. I didn’t know her sarcasm was her way of protecting herself; of keeping the truth from me.

Gladys lingered. I saw her walking down a dirt road in a white dress, I saw what was behind her, I heard her voice in my ear, but it wasn’t until I found the unnamed ancestor at the head of the Dupree line that I knew my novel was much bigger than my original intention.

Knowing the ancestor’s ending became my new beginning. I asked the other daughters their names, and I asked them about the turning points in their lives where they remembered themselves changing; when the girl, the optimist in them died, and they became calculating and pragmatic, hardened to ways of the world.

As a Black mother, I recognized in myself and my friends that our turning points directly corresponded to the men in our lives and whether or not we choose to mother. Those turning points then became my scaffolding to write everything between the beams: colorism, the Black Maternal Health Crisis, the Great Migration, slavery—specifically the discovery of the Clotilda slave ship (that I was absolutely obsessed with), mother-daughter relationships, and how we all have to reckon with history; personally and nationally, perhaps even globally, to reckon, repair, and heal.

I wrote each daughter in earnest from May to August of 2022. My laptop lived under my bed and my lap desk laid against the nightstand. I wrote their stories every morning at 5 a.m. while my own daughter, an infant at the time, laid in the bed next to me always ready to nurse. I was so captured by these women I wrote Jubi’s story while on a bachelorette party trip in Mexico. Before the day’s planned itinerary in trendy Tulum, I wrote.

These women did not haunt me, they inhabited me until each daughter was satisfied her story had been told and still I wasn’t done. As I braided each of the seven narratives together there were some obvious parallels, but to answer, “What comes next,” I asked the daughters and they answered.

They were generous in the telling as I hope readers will find me generous in the writing.