James Hannaham

James Hannaham is an American novelist and artist. He is the author of Delicious Foods (2015), a darkly comic and morally complex novel about a young Black man whose mother is trapped in a modern slavery scheme on a Louisiana farm, narrated in part by crack cocaine personified. The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2016, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Hannaham studied creative writing at Yale University and received his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. He is also an artist whose visual work has been exhibited in galleries and museums, and he has written on art and culture for publications including the Village Voice and Out magazine. His debut novel God Says No (2009) received warm critical recognition. Hannaham's work is celebrated for its formal risk-taking, its refusal of sentimental resolutions, and its capacity to hold tragedy and dark comedy in productive tension. He teaches creative writing at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he lives.