Jamel Brinkley is the author of WITNESS, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. A LUCKY MAN 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.

Books by Jamel Brinkley

Witness: Stories

by Jamel Brinkley - Fiction, Short Stories

In these 10 stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters --- from children to grandmothers to ghosts --- live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect, to remember, to stand up for, and to really see each other, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape not only their own futures but the legacies and prospects of their families and their city. In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief and the meaning of home, WITNESS enacts its own testimony.