Jamel Brinkley is an American writer. His debut story collection, A Lucky Man (2018), was the winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award, The Story Prize, the John Leonard Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.[1] He currently teaches fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.[2][3]
Jamel Brinkley was raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, New York City. He graduated from Columbia University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he teaches.[4] His first book, A Lucky Man, is set in New York City and explores themes of family relationships, love, loss, complex identity, and masculinity. NPR said of the collection, "[It] may include only nine stories, but in each of them, Brinkley gives us an entire world."[5][6]
Brinkley is an alumnus of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and he was also a Kimbilio Fellow in Fiction.[7] He graduated with an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He was the 2016-2017 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.[8][6][9]