Venita Blackburn

Blackburn was born in Harbor City, Los Angeles and grew up in Compton, California,^[1] the youngest of three children.^[5] When Blackburn was 24, her mother died, and four years later her father also died.^[5] Blackburn was raised Southern Baptist^[5] and taught at a Sunday school in her early twenties.^[10]

After graduating from Compton High School at 16,^[5][11] Blackburn attended University of Southern California,^[5] then Arizona State University as a postgrad, where she obtained an MFA in Fiction.^[12]

In 2016, Blackburn founded Live, Write, a non-profit that organizes free writing workshops for writers of color.^[13]

Blackburn's debut short story collection, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, was published in 2017, after winning the 2016 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Fiction.^[14] It also won the 2018 PEN America Los Angeles Literary Award for Fiction,^[15] and was nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize^[16] and the Young Lions Fiction Award.^[17] The titular story, "Black Jesus", was later selected for the collection Be Gay Do Crime: Sixteen Stories of Queer Chaos, edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley.^[18]

In 2021, Blackburn's next short story collection, How to Wrestle a Girl was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.^[19] In this collection, Blackburn experimented with short stories told in unconventional forms, such as quizzes and crossword puzzles.^[20] The Paris Review named the collection as one of their staff picks.^[21] Writing for The New York Times, Jared Jackson praised Blackburn's linguistic economy, but criticized the fragmented nature of some stories,^[20] and Publishers Weekly found some experimentally formatted stories felt more like exercises than stories.^[19] The book was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction in 2022.^[2]

Dead in Long Beach, California, Blackburn's debut novel, published in 2024,^[22] the second book in her two-book deal with Farrar, Straus & Giroux.^[12] The novel is written in first-person plural,^[23] following Coral, a young woman who impersonates her brother after he commits suicide.^[24] Stef Robino of Autostraddle praised the novel as a "masterful feat of storytelling".^[25] In her review for The New York Times, Megan Milks praised the "disarming humor and vivacity" of Blackburn's prose.^[26] However, Stephen Kearse, writing for The Washington Post, described the novel as "more void than vision".^[24] Publishers Weekly was critical of the novel's "dense and obscure" excerpts from the in-universe graphic novel, but praised Blackburn's skills as an "excellent prose stylist".^[27]

Blackburn is working on a novel based on a short story she wrote for Gagosian Quarterly,^[1][28] about a ghoul and a poltergeist falling in love, who possess the bodies of two Black lesbians during the Reconstruction era.^[29][30]

Blackburn currently resides in Fresno, California,^[1] where she works as an Associate Professor of English at California State University.^[31]

She is gay^[5] and married her partner in 2024.^[32]

• 2016 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Fiction for Black Jesus and Other Superheroes^[14]
• 2018 PEN America Los Angeles Literary Award for Fiction for Black Jesus and Other Superheroes^[15]
• 2018 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Black Jesus and Other Superheroes (finalist)^[33]
• 2018 Young Lions Fiction Award for Black Jesus and Other Superheroes (finalist)^[17]
• 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction for How to Wrestle a Girl (finalist)^[2]
• 2025 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Dead in Long Beach, California (finalist)^[3]
• 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction for Dead in Long Beach California (finalist)^[4]