Featuring | NYFA Hall of Fame Honoree Paul Beatty

Beatty (Fellow in Poetry ‘93) will be inducted into the NYFA Hall of Fame on April 12, 2018 alongside Patron of the Arts Phil Gilbert and Carolee Schneemann (Fellow in Performance/Multidisciplinary ‘87).

Novelist and poet Paul Beatty’s 2016 novel The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2015) garnered him top literary prizes including the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, as well as a spot on many “best of books of the year” lists and The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times’ Bestseller lists. Beatty was the first American author to win the Man Booker Prize in its 48-year history (U.S. authors became eligible in 2014); the prize is recognized as the leading literary award in the English-speaking world. A biting satire about a young man’s isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, The Sellout showcases Beatty’s fierce wit, subversive social commentary, and originality in storytelling.

In addition to The Sellout, Beatty is author of the novels Tuff (Anchor 1998), Slumberland (Bloomsbury USA 2008), and The White Boy Shuffle (Picador 1996), and the poetry collections Big Bank Take Little Bank (Nuyorican Poets Café Press 1991) and Joker, Joker, Deuce (Penguin 1994). He was the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor (Bloomsbury USA 2006). In 2017, he was the winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award. He lives in New York City.

Stay tuned for our next post about 2018 Hall of Fame Honoree Phil Gilbert, and learn more about NYFA’s 2018 Hall of Fame Benefit here. Sign up for NYFA’s bi-weekly newsletter, NYFA News, to receive announcements about future NYFA events and programs.

Image: Paul Beatty (Fellow in Poetry ‘93), Photo Credit: Hannah Assouline