Dominion | Addie E. Citchens

Short-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

A finalist for the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr., shepherd of the Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church, believes in God, his own privilege, and enterprise. He owns the barbershop and the radio station, and generally keeps an iron hand on every aspect of society in Dominion, Mississippi. He and his wife, Priscilla, have five boys; the youngest, Emanuel, is called Wonderboy—no one sings prettier, runs as fast, or turns as many heads. But Wonderboy, his father, and all the structures in place that keep them on top are not as righteous as they seem to be. And when Wonderboy is caught off guard by an encounter with a stranger, he finds himself confronted by questions he’d never imagined. His response sends shock waves through the entire community.

Priscilla and Diamond, two women who love these men, bear witness to their charms and bear the brunt of their choices. Through their eyes and their stories, Dominion offers an intricate, intimate view of how secrets control us, how shame stifles us, how silence implicates us, and how even love plays a role in the everyday violence and casual sins of the powerful.

Addie E. Citchens was born in the Mississippi Delta and lives in New Orleans. A graduate of Jackson State University, she studied at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the Oxford American, Midnight & Indigo, Mississippi Folklife Magazine, and other publications. She was the inaugural recipient of the Farrar, Straus and Giroux Writer’s Fellowship, and her short story “That Girl” was an O. Henry Prize winner. Dominion is her first novel.