Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of HERE COMES THE SUN (Norton/Liveright, July 2016), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a 2017 Lambda Literary Award winner. Her bestselling sophomore novel, PATSY (Norton/Liveright, June 2019), is a 2020 Lambda Literary Award winner, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Financial Times Critics Choice, a Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book, and a Today Show Read With Jenna Book Club selection. PATSY has been named Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, TIME, NPR, PEOPLE Magazine, Washington Post, Apple Books, Oprah Magazine, The Guardian, Goodhousekeeping, BuzzFeed, ELLE, among others. “Patsy fills a literary void with compassion, complexity and tenderness,” raves Time Magazine; and NPR names Dennis-Benn “an indispensable novelist”.
In addition to being a two time Lambda Literary Award Winner for her novels PATSY and HERE COMES THE SUN, Dennis-Benn is a recipient of the National Foundation for the Arts Grant. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize; and has recently been long-listed for The Pen/Faulkner Award in Fiction and short-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Elle, BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, The Rumpus, Catapult, Red Rock Review, and Kweli Literary Journal, Mosaic, Ebony, and the Feminist Wire. She has previously taught in the writing programs at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, Sarah Lawrence College, and City College; and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Lambda, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Hurston/Wright, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Dennis-Benn was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. She is a graduate of St. Andrew High School for Girls and Cornell University; and holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Dennis-Benn is the founder of the Stuyvesant Writing Workshop and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York.
Longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction