Early life and education
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 passed away. [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]
Career
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 TheNew 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]
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