Percival Everett is an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and visual artist. His work is celebrated for its formal inventiveness, philosophical rigor, and sharp interrogation of race and representation in American culture. The author of more than thirty books, Everett moves fluidly among a wide range of subjects, styles, and genres, from satire to thriller, western, experimental fiction, and reimagined classics. As a visual artist, Everett creates drawings and paintings that explore abstraction, composition, and narrative.
Among Everett’s acclaimed literary works are the novels Erasure (2001), a satirical critique of the publishing industry’s racial expectations that won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and inspired the 2023 Academy Award-nominated film American Fiction; Telephone (2020), a Pulitzer Prize finalist published in three editions with alternate endings; The Trees (2021), shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Dr. No (2022), recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; and James (2024), a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the character Jim’s perspective, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Everett has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California since 1998, where he is Distinguished Professor of English. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (2014) and Guggenheim Foundation (2015) and received the 2021 Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle.
