DéLana R.A. Dameron, a poet and novelist whose work spoke with aching honesty about the Black experience in the modern South, and who moonlighted as a competitive horsewoman from her farm in South Carolina, died on Nov. 29 in Columbia, S.C. She was 40.
Curtis John, her husband, said she was found unresponsive at home and died on the way to a hospital. He said the cause was complications of kidney and heart problems.
Ms. Dameron emerged first as a poet, publishing her debut collection, “How God Ends Us,” to acclaim in 2009 and winning the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize.
Her poems were suffused with the experience of life in the post-Jim Crow South, especially as a Black woman. In her poem “The Body as a House,” she wrote:
Say your body is only flesh and not a house of habitable organs. Repent. You should not say it. Say the body is imperfect and love it still. The body is, in fact, imperfect, but say you love it, as I do.
Her first book of prose, a collection of linked stories called “Redwood Court” (2024), followed similar themes. It centers on Mika, a young girl growing up in the 1990s and a fictional stand-in for Ms. Dameron, and a cast of characters who live around her on a suburban cul-de-sac.
The novelist Charmaine Wilkerson wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Ms. Dameron “does a beautiful job weaving in local vernacular and casting a fresh gaze on an engaging, though flawed, cast of characters.” The actress Reese Witherspoon selected “Redwood Court” for her popular book club.
Ms. Dameron intended those books, as well as another volume of poetry, “Weary Kingdom” (2017), to be the start of a 10-book cycle exploring everyday Black life in and around Columbia, her hometown. She drew inspiration from the playwright August Wilson, who did something similar for his native Pittsburgh in his 10-play cycle set in different decades of the 20th century.
“She was a world builder,” Maya Millett, Ms. Dameron’s editor at Random House, said in an interview.
Ms. Dameron wanted her cycle to encompass a variety of forms: poetry, novels, even children’s literature. (She wrote a picture book about her horse Shadrach, which is in currently in production.)
“I believe my project as a writer who is also Black and Southern is to document the experience of Black, Southern folks across multiple generations,” she said in an interview last year with the website Indyweek.
Ms. Dameron’s love for horses emerged relatively recently, but it swiftly shaped her life. She told friends that she had always wanted to ride but that she never had the money.
After returning to South Carolina in 2019 after 13 years in New York City, though, she started taking riding lessons, and in 2021, she and Mr. John bought a farm, Saloma Acres, outside Columbia, the state capital.
Within a few years she was riding competitively, focusing on cowboy-inspired events like mounted shooting and cow work, an event that involves herding and corralling livestock. She rode her horses Jazzie June and Shadrach for shooting events but preferred another, Gravie, for cow work.
Saloma Acres is a working paddock, home to eight horses, two donkeys and two pigs. Ms. Dameron also made it a public space, hosting events like theater productions and movie nights. Among the cultural groups she brought to the farm was the Luminal Theater, an organization, run by Mr. John, which shows Black-made independent films on a screen assembled in a field.
“Her intention was to make sure that Black people felt comfortable in nature and were connected to the land,” Renée Watson, a writer and friend of Ms. Dameron’s, said in an interview. “She was very good at gathering folks and making sure that everyone felt welcomed.”
DéLana Rachel Ann Dameron was born on Jan. 30, 1985, in Anderson, a town in northwestern South Carolina, and grew up in Columbia
Her father, Thomas, served as a radio communications specialist in the Army and later worked in satellite communications. Her mother, Rena (Melvin) Dameron, worked in day care.
Ms. Dameron received a degree in history from the University of North Carolina in 2007 and later earned a master’s in fine arts in poetry from New York University. She held a number of fellowships and residences over the last decade, including a summer poet-in-residence position at the University of Mississippi in 2018.
In addition to her husband, she is survived by her sister, Tressa Dameron.
After her time in New York, Ms. Dameron returned to South Carolina in part to reconnect to the land and the people that she had dedicated her life to celebrating.
“My relationship to the South has remained complicated and loaded, but there will always be reverence and love,” she said in a news release announcing her position at the University of Mississippi. “I had to put distance between us to know how to love it, to appreciate what it gave me and to understand what it might have taken away.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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