Nafissa Thompson-Spires is an African American writer. Her first book, Heads of the Colored People, published in 2019, is a collection of stories that received significant recognition in the literary community. The work won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the PEN Open Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction, and an Audie Award. Thompson-Spires' debut novel, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford, is forthcoming from Scribner in 2026.