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Venita Blackburn

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Venita Blackburn
At an ASU alumni reading in 2022
Born1983 (age 41–42)
Los Angeles, California, United States
Alma mater
OccupationAuthor
Known forFlash fiction
Notable work
  • Black Jesus and Other Superheroes
  • How to Wrestle a Girl
  • Dead in Long Beach, California
Websitevenitablackburn.com

Venita Blackburn (born 1983)[1] is an American author. Her short story collection How to Wrestle a Girl was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction in 2022[2] and her debut novel Dead in Long Beach, California was a finalist for the 2025 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.[3] She is known for writing flash fiction[4] and her stories have been published in The New Yorker,[5] The Atlantic,[6] Harper's[7] and The Paris Review.[8]

Early life and education

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Blackburn was born in Harbor City, Los Angeles and grew up in Compton, California,[1] the youngest of three children.[4] When Blackburn was 24, her mother died, and four years later her father also passed away.[4] Blackburn was raised Southern Baptist[4] and taught at a Sunday school in her early twenties.[9]

After graduating from Compton High School at 16,[4][10] Blackburn attended University of Southern California,[4] then Arizona State University as a postgrad, where she obtained an MFA in Fiction.[11]

In 2016, Blackburn founded Live, Write, a non-profit that organizes free writing workshops for writers of color.[12]

Career

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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.[13] It also won the 2018 PEN America Los Angeles Literary Award for Fiction,[14] and was nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize[15] and the Young Lions Fiction Award.[16] 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.[17]

In 2021, Blackburn's next short story collection, How to Wrestle a Girl was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.[18] In this collection, Blackburn experimented with short stories told in unconventional forms, such as quizzes and crossword puzzles.[19] The Paris Review named the collection as one of their staff picks.[20] Writing for The New York Times, Jared Jackson praised Blackburn's linguistic economy, but criticized the fragmented nature of some stories,[19] and Publishers Weekly found some experimentally formatted stories felt more like exercises than stories.[18] 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,[21] the second book in her two-book deal with Farrar, Straus & Giroux.[11] The novel is written in first-person plural,[22] following Coral, a young woman who impersonates her brother after he commits suicide.[23] Stef Robino of Autostraddle praised the novel as a "masterful feat of storytelling".[24] In her review for The New York Times, Megan Milks praised the "disarming humor and vivacity" of Blackburn's prose.[25] However, Stephen Kearse, writing for The Washington Post, described the novel as "more void than vision".[23] 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".[26]

Blackburn is working on a novel based on a short story she wrote for Gagosian Quarterly,[1][27] about a ghoul and a poltergeist falling in love, who possess the bodies of two Black lesbians during the Reconstruction era.[28][29]

Personal life

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Blackburn currently resides in Fresno, California,[1] where she works as an Associate Professor of English at California State University.[30]

She is gay[4] and married her partner in 2024.[31]

Works

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Novels

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  • Dead in Long Beach, California (2024)

Collected short fiction

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  • Black Jesus and Other Superheroes (2017)
  • How to Wrestle a Girl (2021)

Short fiction

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Essays

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Awards and nominations

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d Miranda, Carolina A. (January 11, 2024). "This L.A. flash-fiction star thinks novels are 'saggy.' Her own debut proves her wrong". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on May 25, 2025. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  2. ^ a b c "Here are the finalists for the 2022 Lambda Literary Awards". Literary Hub. March 16, 2022. Archived from the original on June 11, 2025. Retrieved June 9, 2025.
  3. ^ a b egalluscio (April 10, 2025). "Announcing The 2025 PEN America Literary Awards Finalists". PEN America. Retrieved June 10, 2025.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g Rudi, Mariella (January 16, 2024). "Venita Blackburn's First Novel Runs on Denial". Vulture. Retrieved June 9, 2025.
  5. ^ Blackburn, Venita (August 5, 2021). "Halloween". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Archived from the original on September 25, 2024. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  6. ^ Munday, Oliver (August 22, 2022). "The Atlantic Presents: Shorter Stories". The Atlantic. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  7. ^ "Black Communion, by Venita Blackburn". Harper's Magazine. Archived from the original on April 29, 2025. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  8. ^ "Fam by Venita Blackburn". Vol. Fall 2018, no. 226. 2018. ISSN 0031-2037. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  9. ^ "Why I Write: I Know Ghosts". Alta Online. June 21, 2024. Retrieved June 10, 2025.
  10. ^ "College of Arts and Humanities". cah.fresnostate.edu. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  11. ^ a b Kachka, Boris (January 13, 2024). "The best really short stories — and the LAPL's new publishing side hustle". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  12. ^ "Blackburn; Venita – Story". www.storymagazine.org. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  13. ^ a b "2016 Archives - Prairie Schooner". Prairie Schooner. Archived from the original on April 18, 2025. Retrieved June 9, 2025.
  14. ^ a b "The 2018 Los Angeles Literary Award Winners, Finalists, and Judges". PEN America. September 27, 2018. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  15. ^ "Venita Blackburn is a PEN finalist". UNP blog. January 29, 2018. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  16. ^ a b "Young Lions Award List of Winners and Finalists". The New York Public Library. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  17. ^ "Can breaking the rules save queer people? | Xtra Magazine". June 4, 2025. Retrieved June 10, 2025.
  18. ^ a b "How to Wrestle a Girl: Stories by Venita Blackburn". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  19. ^ a b Jackson, Jared (September 6, 2021). "Venita Blackburn Captures the Wonder, and Danger, of Young Womanhood". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  20. ^ "Staff Picks: Melancholia, Music, and Meaning by The Paris Review". The Paris Review. July 30, 2021. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  21. ^ "18 New Books Coming in January". The New York Times. December 29, 2023. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  22. ^ Byas, Taylor (July 4, 2024). "The Collective, Futuristic 'We' in 'Dead in Long Beach, California'". Alta Online. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  23. ^ a b Kearse, Stephen (January 21, 2024). "Review | Her brother dies. And then she assumes his identity". Washington Post. Archived from the original on January 21, 2024. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  24. ^ Rubino, Stef (January 22, 2024). ""Dead in Long Beach, California" and the Inevitability of Grief". Autostraddle. Retrieved June 10, 2025.
  25. ^ Milks, Megan (January 20, 2024). "She's Posing as Her Dead Brother. It's Just Part of the Grieving Process". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved June 10, 2025.
  26. ^ "Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  27. ^ "Venita Blackburn | Contributors | Gagosian Quarterly". Gagosian. May 31, 2024. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  28. ^ McQueen, Daven (January 24, 2024). "Venita Blackburn on Grief and How We Live With It". Autostraddle. Archived from the original on June 11, 2025. Retrieved June 10, 2025.
  29. ^ Davis, Sara (October 13, 2023). "Kind of Miraculous: PW Talks with Venita Blackburn". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved June 10, 2025.
  30. ^ "College of Arts and Humanities". cah.fresnostate.edu. Archived from the original on June 11, 2025. Retrieved June 10, 2025.
  31. ^ "Instagram". www.instagram.com. Retrieved June 10, 2025.
  32. ^ "The 2018 Finalists For The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize For Debut Fiction Are All Women For The First Time Ever". Bustle. January 25, 2018. Archived from the original on December 4, 2022. Retrieved June 9, 2025.
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