Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories (2023, Farrar, Straus and Giroux/4th Estate), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. A Lucky Man: Stories(2018, Graywolf Press) was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard 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. He was a Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, and an O. Henry Award. His work has also received support from the Lannan Foundation. Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.