Jamaica-born writer Donna Hemans has been said to hear “life sung by a chorus, not a single voice.” Her plots are as intense as thrillers yet as resonant as poetry, and the lyricism and emotional honesty of her work has earned her comparisons to Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat.
When released in 2001, her debut novel River Woman won the Towson University Prize for Literature. Tea by the Sea, which earned Hemans the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature, is her long-awaited second novel.