Author Profile: Brit Bennett

For some people, gaining recognition or going viral can be a long and fruitless task. However, for Brit Bennett, an African American writer currently residing in Los Angeles, it took her just three short days. After receiving her degree in English from the University of Stanford, she then went on to earn her MFA at the University of Michigan. It was there that she wrote the sensational essay in 2014 titled “I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People.” It gained lots of attention on social media, accumulating well over one million views in just three days! She later went on to win the Hopwood Award for the best Graduate Short Fiction.

Her debut novel The Mothers, published in 2016 through Riverhead Books, was an instant hit and became a New York Times bestseller. More than 100,000 copies of the book was printed and was given rave reviews from publications such as Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and the Booklist. Due to the popularity of the book, Bennett was shortlisted in the National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” category of promising novelists. After such achievements, in 2017 reports of a film adaptation of The Mothers was set into motion by Warner Bros, accompanied by the actress Kerry Washington as a producer for the film. However, there has been no word if the film is still being made or has been canceled as of yet.

Bennett’s second novel, The Vanishing Half which was released in June 2020 and was published by Riverhead Books once again, went straight to number one on The New York Times best-seller. It was met with laudation from media publications such as Washington Post, People, Times Magazine and Vanity Fair. It was chosen as one of the ten best books by The New York Times, and Barack Obama even listed it as one of his favorite books of 2020.

The Vanishing Half tells the story of two twin sisters raised in a small, black southern community set in the generation gap between 1950 to 1990. After running away from home at the age of sixteen, their lives take different turns as they enter adulthood. One sister goes back to live with her daughter in the same town they once tried to flee while the other sister is secretly passing as a white woman, with her white husband completely unaware that the woman he married had a mysterious past. With such a long distance between both sisters, it remains to be seen how their lives are still intertwined. What will be the fate of their own children’s lives when their stories cross one another? decussate?

Just after a month of the book being published, HBO stated they had received the rights to create a limited series, with Bennett being an executive producer for the show, along with actress and producer Issa Rae. No word on the cast or release date has been released yet, but we will keep you updated. If you haven’t read The Vanishing Half yet, grab a copy now and let us know what you think.

Article edited by Lola Lujan.