Percival Everett

Percival Everett is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor of English at the University of Southern California. Born in Fort Gordon, Georgia, in 1956, he studied philosophy at the University of Miami and received his MA from Brown University. He is the author of more than thirty books of fiction and poetry across a career of remarkable range, formal innovation, and critical intelligence. Everett's major works include Erasure (2001), a satirical novel about a Black intellectual whose literary pastiche becomes a bestseller when mistaken for an authentic 'Black experience' memoir; I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009); The Trees (2021), a surrealist crime novel about a series of lynching-style murders in Money, Mississippi—the town where Emmett Till was murdered—that won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction in 2022 and was a Booker Prize finalist; and James (2024), a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Booker Prize, and the National Book Award. Everett has received the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. He is one of the most important and critically respected novelists working in American literature today.