Jamel Brinkley

Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories (2023, FSG), a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. A Lucky Man: Stories (2018, Graywolf) was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, Guernica, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories. His work has also received support from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Lannan Foundation. He was a Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and has received an O. Henry Award and the Rome Prize. Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.