Darryl Pinckney
Darryl Pinckney | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1953 (age 70–71) Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Columbia University (BA) |
| Genre | Novelist, playwright |
| Notable works | High Cotton (1992) |
| Notable awards | Whiting Award (1986); Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994) |
| Partner | James Fenton |
| Website | |
| darrylpinckney | |
Darryl Pinckney (born 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana) is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist.
Early life
[edit]Pinckney grew up in a middle-class African-American family in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended local public schools. He was educated at Columbia University in New York City.[1]
Career
[edit]Some of Pinckney's first professional works were theatre texts, plays developed in collaboration with director Robert Wilson.[2] These included the produced works of The Forest (1988) and Orlando (1989). Pinckney returned to theatre with Time Rocker (1995).[3]
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 has published several collections of essays covering topics such as African-American literature, politics, race, and other cultural issues. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Granta, Slate, and The Nation. He frequently explores issues of racial and sexual identities, as expressed in literature and society.
Awards
[edit]- 1986, Whiting Award[4]
- 1992, High Cotton won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.[5]
- 1994, the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters[6]
- 2022, His memoir Come Back in September was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle award in autobiography.[7]
- 2022, James Tait Black Prize for Biography for Come Back in September[8]
Personal life
[edit]Pinckney is gay[9] and lives with his partner, English poet James Fenton; the couple has been together since 1989.[10] Pinckney currently lives in New York City, but previously lived with Fenton in Oxfordshire, England.[11]
Bibliography
[edit]Books
[edit]- High Cotton (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)[12]
- Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan (2022)
Selected essays
[edit]- "England, Whose England?". Granta (16: Science). Summer 1985. (Subscription Required)
- Pinckney, Darryl (February 2010). "Lonely Hearts Club". Harper's. Vol. February 2010.
- "The Ethics of Admiration: Arendt, McCarthy, Hardwick, Sontag". The Threepenny Review. 135. Fall 2013.
- Pinckney, Darryl (February 19, 2015). "Some Different Ways of Looking at Selma". The New York Review of Books. 62 (3).
- Pinckney, Darryl (March 26, 2020). "Escaping Blackness". The New York Review of Books. 67 (5).
- Pinckney, Darryl (August 20, 2020). "'We Must Act Out Our Freedom'". The New York Review of Books. 67 (13).
- Pinckney, Darryl (November 5, 2020). "A Society on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown". The New York Review of Books. 67 (17).
Theatre texts
[edit]- (Collaborations with Robert Wilson)
- The Forest (1988)
- Orlando (1989)
- Time Rocker (1995)
- Garrincha - a street opera (2016)
- Mary Said What She Said (2019)
- Dorian (2022)
- Pessoa: since I've been me (2024)
References
[edit]- ^ "For Darryl Pinckney '88, History Is Personal | Columbia College Today". www.college.columbia.edu. Retrieved 2023-06-12.
- ^ The Center for the Humanities (Dec 12, 2017). "Essay Seminar: Darryl Pinckney". Essay Seminar: Darryl Pinckney. Retrieved 2024-08-25.
- ^ "Robert Wilson". Encyclopedia Britannica. 2 May 2024. Retrieved 25 August 2024.
- ^ "Darryl Pinckney | WHITING AWARDS". Whiting.org. Retrieved December 9, 2016.
- ^ Buckley, Gail Lumet (November 8, 1992). "TIMES BOOK PRIZES 1992 : ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD for First Fiction : On 'High Cotton'". Los Angeles Times.
- ^ Darryl Pinckney page at United Artists.
- ^ Varno, David (2023-02-01). "NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE ANNOUNCES FINALISTS FOR PUBLISHING YEAR 2022". National Book Critics Circle. Retrieved 2023-02-03.
- ^ "Kingsolver, Pinkckney win James Tait Back Prizes". Books+Publishing. 2023-07-27. Retrieved 2023-07-29.
- ^ "Darryl Pinckney's Intimate Study of Black History". The New Yorker. November 26, 2019.
- ^ Jenkins, David (November 18, 2007). "James Fenton: 21st century renaissance man". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved December 9, 2016.
- ^ Pinckney, Darryl (February 8, 2010). "Lonely Hearts Club". Harper's Magazine. Retrieved April 6, 2022.
- ^ Smith, Zadie (November 26, 2019). "Darryl Pinckney's Intimate Study of Black History". The New Yorker.
External links
[edit]- Darryl Pinckney website
- Darryl Pinckney at the New York Review of Books
- Profile at The Whiting Foundation
| International | |
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| National | |
| Academics | |
| People | |
| Other | |
This African American–related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
- 1953 births
- 20th-century African-American writers
- 20th-century American male writers
- 20th-century American novelists
- 21st-century African-American writers
- 21st-century American essayists
- 21st-century American LGBTQ people
- 21st-century American male writers
- 21st-century American novelists
- African-American LGBTQ people
- African-American male writers
- African-American novelists
- American Book Award winners
- American gay writers
- American LGBTQ novelists
- Columbia College (New York) alumni
- Living people
- Novelists from Indiana
- Writers from Indianapolis
- African American stubs