Please join the Department of English Visiting Writers Series for a reading and Q&A with author Jamel Brinkley.
Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories (Graywolf Press, 2018) and the forthcoming collection, Witness: Stories, which will be released in August 2023 by FSG. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, The Believer and Tin House, and it has been anthologized twice in The Best American Short Stories. Brinkley was the 2016-2017 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and he has been awarded a 2021 O. Henry Prize. He currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
A Lucky Man 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 the winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In nine powerful stories set in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, A Lucky Man explores the charged, complex ties between men whose mistakes threaten their relationships. With incisive and nuanced prose, Brinkley reflects the tenderness and vulnerability of Black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender and class.
This reading is free and open to the public. Q&A and book signing to follow. Books will be available for sale from Barnes and Noble.
