Brit Bennett

Brit Bennett was born in 1989 or 1990 in Oceanside, California. She pursued her higher education at Stanford University, earning an undergraduate degree in English. Following this, she attended the University of Michigan, where she completed her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in fiction. During her time at Michigan, Bennett distinguished herself by winning a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction and the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers.

Her career gained significant public attention in 2014 with her essay “I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People” published in Jezebel, which garnered over one million views within three days. This early success was followed by her debut novel, “The Mothers,” released in 2016 by Riverhead Books. The novel quickly became a New York Times bestseller and received critical acclaim, leading to Bennett being named one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” promising debut novelists. “The Mothers” was later optioned by Warner Bros. for a film adaptation, with Kerry Washington attached as a producer.

In 2020, Bennett published her second novel, “The Vanishing Half,” which also achieved New York Times bestseller status, reaching the number-one spot in June of that year. It was selected as a Good Morning America Book Club pick and recognized as one of The New York Times’ ten best books of 2020. The novel was subsequently shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction and won the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Historical Fiction. HBO acquired the rights to develop “The Vanishing Half” into a limited series, with Bennett serving as an executive producer. More recently, in 2022, Bennett collaborated with American Girl to create a new character, Claudie Wells, for their Historical Characters line, writing two books in the series: “Meet Claudie” (2022) and “Adventures with Claudie” (2023).