Biography
Darryl Pinckney is an American novelist, playwright and essayist. Born in 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana, he was educated at Columbia University. His first novel, High Cotton (1992), is a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in a middle-class African-American family. His second novel, Black Deutschland (2016), is set in late-1980s Berlin.
Pinckney has written several works of nonfiction, including Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002) and Busted in New York and Other Essays (2019). He has collaborated on theatrical texts with director Robert Wilson, including The Forest (1988) and Orlando (1989). He appears as himself in the 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.
His awards include a Whiting Award (1986) and the Vursell Award for Distinguished Prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994). He is a long-time contributor to The New York Review of Books.
