Percival Everett

Percival Everett
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Name	Percival Everett
Birth date	1956
Birth place	Los Angeles
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, professor
Nationality	American
Notableworks	"Erasure", "I Am Not Sidney Poitier", "So Much Blue"
Awards	Guggenheim Fellowship, American Book Award

Percival Everett Percival Everett is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and academic known for incisive, satirical, and formally inventive fiction that interrogates race and ethnicity in the United States, engages with literary theory, and experiments with genre. His work spans novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, and he has held faculty positions at major universities while receiving fellowships and prizes from national arts organizations. Everett's writing engages with figures and institutions across American letters and culture.

Early life and education

Percival Everett was born in Los Angeles and raised in South Pasadena and California communities. He studied at Dartmouth College and later earned graduate degrees at the University of Iowa's Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Utah. His formative years involved encounters with poets, novelists, and critics associated with the American literary renaissance and postmodern trajectories, and he trained in workshops that included peers connected to The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and other literary magazines.

Literary career

Everett's literary career began with early publications in literary journals and small presses before he achieved broader recognition through novels published by mainstream houses and independent presses. He has published fiction, poetry, and essays in venues tied to the Library of America's milieu, and his books have been reviewed in outlets such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker. Everett's work converses with authors including Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Irvine Welsh, Kurt Vonnegut, and Samuel Beckett, while critics frequently situate him alongside contemporaries like Colson Whitehead, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, and George Saunders. He has also engaged with debates in African American literature and discussions hosted by institutions such as Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, and the Modern Language Association.

Major works and themes

Everett's notable novels include "Erasure", "I Am Not Sidney Poitier", "So Much Blue", "The Trees", "Glyph", "Wounded", and "Frenzy". "Erasure" satirizes publishing and racial representation and interacts with figures like Toni Morrison and debates around identity politics, while "I Am Not Sidney Poitier" riffs on film history and connects to actors such as Sidney Poitier and directors from Hollywood's mid-20th century. "So Much Blue" looks to European art and music references, invoking painters and composers associated with Paris salons and museum collections. "The Trees" incorporates elements of crime fiction and Southern history, engaging with locales such as Mississippi and historical events tied to racial violence and legal institutions like state courts and federal inquiries. Across these works Everett experiments with narrative form, metafictional devices, and satire, drawing on traditions from realism and modernism to postmodernism and contemporary experimental writing. Recurring themes include racial identity, artistic production, violence, language, and representation, and his novels often dialogue with texts by William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Richard Wright, Cormac McCarthy, and Ernest Hemingway.

Awards and honors

Everett has received multiple honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. His work has been longlisted and shortlisted for prizes connected to institutions like the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Literary organizations such as the PEN America and the Academy of American Poets have recognized his contributions, and he has held named chairs and visiting appointments at universities and cultural institutions across the United States and Europe.

Academic and teaching career

Everett has taught creative writing, literature, and poetry at universities including the University of California, Irvine, the University of Miami, the University of Southern California, and Emory University and has been associated with graduate programs connected to the Iowa Writers' Workshop network. He has served as a visiting professor and writer-in-residence at institutions such as Princeton University, Columbia University, Duke University, Brown University, and the University of Chicago. His pedagogical work intersects with interdisciplinary programs in African American studies and creative writing, and he has supervised theses and dissertations that engage with contemporary literary theory, cultural studies, and film criticism linked to departments at Yale, Stanford University, and Oxford University.

Personal life and influences

Everett's influences range from novelists and poets—Ralph Ellison, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, John Keats, Sylvia Plath—to filmmakers and musicians connected to Hollywood and jazz history. His friendships and correspondences include figures in publishing houses such as Knopf, Random House, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and magazines such as The Paris Review and Granta. He has participated in literary festivals and conferences including the Hay Festival, the Brooklyn Book Festival, and academic symposia hosted by the Modern Language Association and has collaborated with playwrights, directors, and visual artists with ties to institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty Center.

Category:American novelists Category:African-American writers Category:Living people