Jamel Brinkley is a writer from New York City. He is the author of A Lucky Man, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2018 and is forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories 2019. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was also a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.