She is the author of six books and numerous essays about race, gender and American identity, including Caucasia (1998), Symptomatic (2003), New People (2017), and most recently Colored Television (2024).

Her maternal grandfather was Mark DeWolfe Howe, who taught at his alma mater, Harvard Law School.

She wrote her honors thesis on the works of writers Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, and William Faulkner.

She has said that the atmosphere there inspired some of her later writing for New People (2017), set in 1990s Brooklyn and described as "a mordantly funny social satire with a thriller edge.

[12] Senna's first novel, Caucasia (1998), is narrated by a young biracial girl, Birdie Lee, who is taken into the political underground by her mother, and forced to live under an assumed identity.

Her second novel, Symptomatic (2004), is a psychological thriller narrated by an unnamed young woman who moves to New York City for what promises to be a dream job – a prestigious fellowship writing for a respected magazine.

As the older woman's interest turns into obsession, the narrator must figure out what their relationship means to her, even as both of their lives seem to spiral out of control.

"[16] In the title story, a woman's strange correspondence with a girl claiming to be her daughter leads her into the doubts and what-ifs of the life she hasn't lived.

In the collection's first story, "Admission," tensions arise between a liberal husband and wife after their son is admitted into the elite daycare school to which they’d applied only on a lark.

[16][17][18] Senna's 2017 book, New People, tells the story of mixed-race Maria and her fiancé Khalil, who live together in '90s Fort Greene, then populated by black artists and bohemians.

Their seemingly perfect "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom" image is troubled by Maria's fixation on a black poet she barely knows.

[26] Ron Charles of The Washington Post wrote: "Senna unfurls a novel that somehow deconstructs its own racial preoccupations, as though she's riding a unicycle up and down a set of Escher staircases… The way [she] keeps this wry story aloft may be the closest paper can come to levitation.

"[27] The book was lauded by the Los Angeles Times in a review that said: "This is the New Great American Novel...Danzy Senna has set the standard.