Introduction
Darryl Pinckney (born 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana) is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist.
Early life
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.
Career
Some of his 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 (1989).
His first novel is High Cotton (1992), a semi-autobiographical novel about "growing up black and bourgeois" in 1960s America. 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.
He returned to theatre with Time Rocker (1995).
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, As the World Turns.
Awards
- 1986, Whiting Award
- 1992, his first novel won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
- 1994, the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
- "Darryl Pinckney | WHITING AWARDS". Whiting.org. Retrieved 9 December 2016.
- Gail Lumet Buckley, "TIMES BOOK PRIZES 1992 : ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD for First Fiction : On 'High Cotton'", Los Angeles Times, 8 November 1992.
- Darryl Pinckney page at United Artists.
Personal life
His partner is English poet James Fenton; the couple has been together since 1989. Pinckney lives in New York City and Oxfordshire, England.