Jamel Brinkley’s short story collection, A Lucky Man, won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award, the 2019 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the 2018 Story Prize, the 2018 John Leonard Prize for Best First Fiction, and the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Fiction. 

He graduated from the Writers’ Workshop in 2015, after which he received the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Residency Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University. At Columbia University, Brinkley received undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and Comparative Literature as well as a bachelor’s degree in African American Studies. He has received scholarships at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Summer Workshop, where he has also served on the fiction faculty.

He was raised in the Bronx and in Brooklyn, New York.