Percival Everett

Born in Fort Gordon, Georgia in 1956, Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty books of fiction and poetry. He is a recent finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (2021) and the recipient of many other accolades, including the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award (2022), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and two Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Awards (2010, 2001). Alchemist and trickster, magician and shapeshifter, Everett is our great chronicler of American unreality, all of his novels combining an idiosyncratic and finely-tuned literary sensibility with sharp observations about aesthetics, gender, politics, race, and sexuality. In works like The Trees (2022), a satirical horror novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Assumption (2011), a crime novel-Western hybrid, Everett’s restless intellect and invention are on full display. He skips across the literary trope-scape, plucking from the campus novel, the neo-noir, and the dream vision, producing fiction that is surprising, provoking, moving—and often very, very funny. Everett is currently Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California, a position he has held since 2007. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.