Jamel Brinkley, the Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, has received the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for his debut work, A Lucky Man (Graywolf Press, 2018).
The award recognizes the outstanding work of rising African-American fiction writers. Brinkley’s book is a collection of nine short stories set in familiar places from his childhood, Brooklyn and the South Bronx. The book is also a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction.
“It’s a huge honor, a surprise and really unbelievable,” Brinkley said of his $10,000 prize. “Ernest Gaines is obviously a legendary writer, someone I read in college. I could never have imagined this.”
Brinkley is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.
