Jamel Brinkley

Jamel Brinkley is the author of the story collections Witness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) and A Lucky Man (Graywolf Press, 2018), which 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 other honors include an O. Henry Award and the Rome Prize.

Brinkley's work has received support from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he was a Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.