Sylviane A. Diouf

Who is Sylviane A. Diouf?

Sylviane Anna Diouf is an award-winning historian. She is the author of Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America Oxford University Press, 2007, which received the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association and the James Sulzby Award of the Alabama Historical Association. It was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her book Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York University Press, 1998) received awards and has raised notice for its detailed, well-written, and well-researched study of Muslims in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries. She is the editor of the critically acclaimed Fighting the Slave trade: West African Strategies (Ohio University Press, 2003), the first book to study, in details, African resistance to the slave trade. She has co-edited In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience (National Geographic, 2005).

Diouf has written several books for younger readers. She received the 2001 Africana Book Award for Older Readers from the African Studies Association for her book Kings and Queens of West Africa, part of a four-book series (Scholastic, 2000). She authored a book on the lives of children enslaved in the United States, Growing Up in Slavery (Lerner, 2001). Her fiction book, Bintou’s Braids (Chronicle Books, 2001) has been published in the USA, France, and Brazil.