Gregg Hecimovich is the author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning biography The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, and is at work on The Columbia Seven, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.
The Bondwoman's Narrative — the manuscript title page, in Hannah Crafts's hand.
In 1857, a woman escaped enslavement on a North Carolina plantation and fled to a farm in New York. In hiding, she worked on a manuscript that would make her famous long after her death. The novel, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, was first published in 2002 to great acclaim, but the author’s identity remained unknown. Over a decade later, Professor Gregg Hecimovich unraveled the mystery of the author’s name and, in The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, he finally tells her story.
"[A]stonishing . . . . At once a mystery, a thriller, and an elegy, this book is a riveting reconstruction of the life." — Jill Lepore, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of We the People (2026)
An ensemble biography of seven people enslaved in Columbia, South Carolina, whose photographs were made for a Harvard naturalist's theory of racial difference in March 1850. The book recovers the people behind the images — following the seven from the daguerreotype studio to the extraordinary lives they led after slavery.
The Zealy daguerreotypes are among the most contested images in American history. The Columbia Seven foregrounds biography over spectacle — restoring the names, kin, and lives behind the portraits.
Gregg Hecimovich is a professor of English at Furman University and a literary historian who works at the seam where biography, the archive, and lost voices meet. His writing reconstructs lives the historical record tried to erase.
His The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts (Ecco, 2023) solved one of the enduring mysteries of American literature and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His current book, The Columbia Seven, extends that method to seven enslaved people photographed by Joseph T. Zealy in 1850, and is supported by a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Occasional notes on the books, events, and the recovery of the Columbia Seven. For speaking inquiries, write gregg.hecimovich@furman.edu.
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