Darryl Pinckney

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 Pinckney's 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). Pinckney returned to theatre with Time Rocker (1995).

His first book 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, Germany, 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.

Pinckney's memoir Come Back in September was published in 2022. Rachel Cooke in an interview for The Observer described reading it as "like being at a particularly fabulous literary party. ...But the real star of the show – the book's constant and slightly terrifying presence – is the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, Pinckney’s friend of more than three decades and the key that first turned the lock on his exciting New York life."

Awards 1986, Whiting Award 1992, High Cotton 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 2022, Come Back in September was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography. 2022, James Tait Black Prize for Biography for Come Back in September

Personal life Pinckney is gay and lives with his partner, English poet James Fenton; the couple has been together since 1989. Pinckney currently lives in New York City, but previously lived with Fenton in Oxfordshire, England.