Swift River

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of racism, death, and graphic violence.

Essie Chambers earned her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Columbia. She formerly worked as a film and television executive, including working as a producer on the documentary Descendant, released by the Obamas’ Higher Ground production company and Netflix in 2022.

Swift River was many years in the making, inspired by Chambers’s own experience of growing up isolated from other Black Americans. Encouraged to work on her own writing by author Jacqueline Woodson, with whom Chambers worked while in television, Chambers initially conceived of the work as a short story, but the project expanded when Chambers was in graduate school, eventually encompassing not only Diamond’s modern-day storyline but also the history of her family (Kim, Crystal Hana. “Life Is Tragicomic: A Conversation with Essie Chambers.” The Rumpus, 28 Jun. 2024).

As Chambers explains, research was critical to the way the book evolved. According to the Author’s Note at the end of the novel, Chambers drew on a number of works in writing Swift River, including Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, and James W.