Darryl Pinckney (born 1953 in

Indianapolis, Indiana Indianapolis (), colloquially known as Indy, is the List of U.S. state and territorial capitals, state capital and List of U.S. states' largest cities by population, most populous city of the U.S. state of Indiana and the county seat, seat of ...

) is an American

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living wage, living writing novels and other fiction, while othe ...

playwright A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays. Etymology The word "play" is from Middle English pleye, from Old English plæġ, pleġa, plæġa ("play, exercise; sport, game; drama, applause"). The word "wright" is an archaic English ...

, and

essayist An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal an ...

Early life

Pinckney grew up in a middle-class African-American family in

, where he attended local public schools. He was educated at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manha ...

in New York City.

Career

Some of Pinckney's first professional works were theatre texts, plays developed in collaboration with director Robert Wilson. These included the produced works of '' The Forest'' (1988) and ''

Orlando Orlando () is a city in the U.S. state of Florida and is the county seat of Orange County. In Central Florida, it is the center of the Orlando metropolitan area, which had a population of 2,509,831, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures r ...

'' (1989). Pinckney returned to theatre with ''

Time Rocker Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to co ...

'' (1995). His first novel was ''High Cotton'' (1992), a semi-autobiographical novel about "growing up black and bourgeois" in 1960s America. His second novel was ''Black Deutschland'' (2016), about a young gay black man in Berlin in the late 1980s, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Pinckney is also a frequent contributor to the ''

New York Review of Books New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created. New or NEW may refer to: Music * New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz Albums and EPs * ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013 * ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator ...

'', ''

Granta ''Granta'' is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centres on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and ma ...

'', ''

Slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic ro ...

'', and ''

The Nation ''The Nation'' is an American liberal biweekly magazine that covers political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded on July 6, 1865, as a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's ''The Liberator'', an abolitionist newspaper tha ...

''. He frequently explores issues of racial and sexual identities, as expressed in literature. In the 21st century, Pinckney has published two collections of essays on African-American literature. He has expressed his admiration for the writing of the long-running American CBS

soap opera A soap opera, or ''soap'' for short, is a typically long-running radio or television serial, frequently characterized by melodrama, ensemble casts, and sentimentality. The term "soap opera" originated from radio dramas originally being sponsored ...

, '' As the World Turns''.

Awards

*1986,

Whiting Award The Whiting Award is an American award presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays. The award is sponsored by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Mrs. (American English) or Mrs (British English; standard E ...

*1992, ''High Cotton'' won the ''Los Angeles Times''

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, established in 1991, is a category of the ''Los Angeles Times'' Book Prize awarded to authors' debut books of fiction. It is named for the Los Angeles Times' critic Art Seidenbaum who was also an author ...

. *1994, the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Personal life

He is gay. His partner is English poet

James Fenton James is a common English language surname and given name: *James (name), the typically masculine first name James * James (surname), various people with the last name James James or James City may also refer to: People * King James (disambiguat ...

; the couple has been together since 1989. Pinckney lives in New York City and Oxfordshire, England.

Bibliography

Books

* ''

High Cotton ''High Cotton'' is a collection of short fiction by Joe R. Lansdale, initially published in 2000. In his introduction, Lansdale cites it as the "Best of Lansdale", and has called this work a companion piece to the 2004 collection ''Bumper Crop'' ...

'' (novel; 1992) * '' Sold and Gone: African American Literature and U.S. Society'' (2001) * '' Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature'' (2002) * '' Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy'' (2014) * ''Black Deutschland'' (2016) * ''Busted in New York and Other Essays'' (2019; Foreword by Zadie Smith) * ''Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan'' (2022)

Selected essays

* (Subscription Required) * * * * * *

Theatre texts

*(Collaborations with Robert Wilson) ** '' The Forest'' (1988) ** ''

'' (1989) ** ''

'' (1995)

References

External links

Darryl Pinckney websiteDarryl Pinckney at the ''New York Review of Books''Profile at The Whiting Foundation
1953 births Living people Writers from Indianapolis African-American novelists 21st-century essayists 20th-century American novelists American gay writers American LGBT novelists 21st-century American novelists LGBT African Americans 20th-century American male writers 21st-century American male writers Novelists from Indiana Columbia College (New York) alumni 20th-century African-American writers 21st-century African-American writers 21st-century LGBT people African-American male writers {{AfricanAmerican-stub