Brit Bennett
Brit Bennett is an American writer based in Los Angeles. Her debut novel The Mothers (2016) was a New York Times best-seller. Her second novel, The Vanishing Half (2020), was also a New York Times best-seller; further, it was chosen as a Good Morning
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Brit Bennett is an American writer based in Los Angeles. Her debut novel The Mothers (2016) was a New York Times best-seller. Her second novel, The Vanishing Half (2020), was also a New York Times best-seller; further, it was chosen as a Good Morning America Book Club selection. The Vanishing Half was also selected as one of The New York Times' ten best books of 2020.
Bennett was raised in Southern California and received an undergraduate degree in English from Stanford University. She later attended the University of Michigan for her M.F.A. She also studied at Oxford University.
While she was completing her M.F.A. at Michigan, Bennett's 2014 essay for Jezebel "I Don't Know What to Do With Good White People" gained considerable attention, generating over one million views in three days. While at Michigan, she also won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers.
She has since published other nonfiction essays, including a history of black dolls called "Addy Walker, American Girl" for the Paris Review, as well as a review of the 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between the World and Me for The New Yorker. Vogue said Bennett's nonfiction essays "recall Ta-Nehisi Coates [with] a similar ability to contextualize the present moment in a bigoted past."
She is one of the National Book Foundation's 2016 5 Under 35 honorees.
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