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Toya Wolfe

Born: Chicago, Illinois
Connection to Illinois: Wolfe grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago's South Side. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Biography: Toya Wolfe was born and raised in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in African Voices, Chicago Journal, Chicago Reader, Hairtrigger 27, and Warpland: a journal of Black Ideas. She is the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston-Bessie Head Fiction Award, the Union League Civic & Arts Foundation Short Story Competition, and the Betty Shifflet/John Schultz Short Story Award. Last Summer on State Street is her debut novel.


Awards:

Primary Literary Genre(s): Fiction

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tosi.woods
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/toyawolves
Twitter: https://twitter.com/toyawolves
Web: https://www.toyawolfe.com
WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=Toya++Wolfe


Selected Titles

Last Summer on State Street: A Novel
ISBN: 0063209748 OCLC: 1266201136

William Morrow 2022

Even when we lose it all, we find the strength to rebuild. Felicia “Fe Fe” Stevens is living with her vigilantly loving mother and older teenaged brother, whom she adores, in building 4950 of Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes. It’s the summer of 1999, and her high-rise is next in line to be torn down by the Chicago Housing Authority. She, with the devout Precious Brown and Stacia Buchanan, daughter of a Gangster Disciple Queen-Pin, form a tentative trio and, for a brief moment, carve out for themselves a simple life of Double Dutch and innocence. But when Fe Fe welcomes a mysterious new friend, Tonya, into their fold, the dynamics shift, upending the lives of all four girls. As their beloved neighborhood falls down around them, so too do their friendships and the structures of the four girls’ families. Fe Fe must make the painful decision of whom she can trust and whom she must let go. Decades later, as she remembers that fateful summer—just before her home was demolished, her life uprooted, and community forever changed—Fe Fe tries to make sense of the grief and fraught bonds that still haunt her and attempts to reclaim the love that never left. Profound, reverent, and uplifting, Last Summer on State Street explores the risk of connection against the backdrop of racist institutions, the restorative power of knowing and claiming one’s own past, and those defining relationships which form the heartbeat of our lives. Interweaving moments of reckoning and sustaining grace, debut author Toya Wolfe has crafted an era-defining story of finding a home—both in one’s history and in one’s self.

 

 

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