Venita Blackburn
Birth date1983 (age 43–44)
Birth placeLos Angeles, California, United States
Alma mater
OccupationAuthor
Known forFlash fiction
Notable works
  • 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] and the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.[4] She is known for writing flash fiction[5] and her stories have been published in The New Yorker,[6] The Atlantic,[7] Harper's[8] and The Paris Review.[9]

Early life and education

Blackburn was born in Harbor City, Los Angeles and grew up in Compton, California,[1] the youngest of three children.[5] When Blackburn was 24, her mother died, and four years later her father also died.[5] Blackburn was raised Southern Baptist[5] and taught at a Sunday school in her early twenties.[10]

After graduating from Compton High School at 16,[5][11] Blackburn attended University of Southern California,[5] then Arizona State University as a postgrad, where she obtained an MFA in Fiction.[12]

In 2016, Blackburn founded Live, Write, a non-profit that organizes free writing workshops for writers of color.[13]

Career

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.[14] It also won the 2018 PEN America Los Angeles Literary Award for Fiction,[15] and was nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize[16] and the Young Lions Fiction Award.[17] 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.[18]

In 2021, Blackburn's next short story collection, How to Wrestle a Girl was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.[19] In this collection, Blackburn experimented with short stories told in unconventional forms, such as quizzes and crossword puzzles.[20] The Paris Review named the collection as one of their staff picks.[21] Writing for The New York Times, Jared Jackson praised Blackburn's linguistic economy, but criticized the fragmented nature of some stories,[20] and Publishers Weekly found some experimentally formatted stories felt more like exercises than stories.[19] 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,[22] the second book in her two-book deal with Farrar, Straus & Giroux.[12] The novel is written in first-person plural,[23] following Coral, a young woman who impersonates her brother after he commits suicide.[24] Stef Robino of Autostraddle praised the novel as a "masterful feat of storytelling".[25] In her review for The New York Times, Megan Milks praised the "disarming humor and vivacity" of Blackburn's prose.[26] However, Stephen Kearse, writing for The Washington Post, described the novel as "more void than vision".[24] 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".[27]

Blackburn is working on a novel based on a short story she wrote for Gagosian Quarterly,[1][28] about a ghoul and a poltergeist falling in love, who possess the bodies of two Black lesbians during the Reconstruction era.[29][30]

Personal life

Blackburn currently resides in Fresno, California,[1] where she works as an Associate Professor of English at California State University.[31]

She is gay[5] and married her partner in 2024.[32]

Works

Novels

  • Dead in Long Beach, California (2024)

Collected short fiction

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

Short fiction

Essays

Awards and nominations

References

  1. ^ Miranda, Carolina A. (2024-01-11). "This L.A. flash-fiction star thinks novels are 'saggy.' Her own debut proves her wrong". Los Angeles Times. Archived 2025-05-25 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  2. ^ "Here are the finalists for the 2022 Lambda Literary Awards.". Literary Hub. 2022-03-16. Archived 2025-06-11 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2025-06-09.
  3. ^ egalluscio (2025-04-10). "Announcing The 2025 PEN America Literary Awards Finalists". PEN America. Retrieved 2025-06-10.
  4. ^ Lewis, L. D. (2025-07-30). "Announcing the Finalists for the 37th Annual Lambda Literary Awards". Lambda Literary. Retrieved 2025-08-11.
  5. ^ Rudi, Mariella (2024-01-16). "Venita Blackburn's First Novel Runs on Denial". Vulture. Retrieved 2025-06-09.
  6. ^ Blackburn, Venita (2021-08-05). "Halloween". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Archived 2024-09-25 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  7. ^ Munday, Oliver (2022-08-22). "The Atlantic Presents: Shorter Stories". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  8. ^ "Black Communion, by Venita Blackburn". Harper's Magazine. Archived 2025-04-29 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  9. ^ "Fam by Venita Blackburn". Vol. Fall 2018, no. 226. 2018. ISSN 0031-2037. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  10. ^ "Why I Write: I Know Ghosts". Alta Online. 2024-06-21. Retrieved 2025-06-10.
  11. ^ "College of Arts and Humanities". cah.fresnostate.edu. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  12. ^ Kachka, Boris (2024-01-13). "The best really short stories — and the LAPL's new publishing side hustle". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  13. ^ "Blackburn; Venita – Story". www.storymagazine.org. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  14. ^ "2016 Archives - Prairie Schooner". Prairie Schooner. Archived 2025-04-18 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2025-06-09.
  15. ^ "The 2018 Los Angeles Literary Award Winners, Finalists, and Judges". PEN America. 2018-09-27. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  16. ^ "Venita Blackburn is a PEN finalist". UNP blog. 2018-01-29. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  17. ^ "Young Lions Award List of Winners and Finalists". The New York Public Library. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  18. ^ "Can breaking the rules save queer people? | Xtra Magazine". 2025-06-04. Retrieved 2025-06-10.
  19. ^ "How to Wrestle a Girl: Stories by Venita Blackburn". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  20. ^ Jackson, Jared (2021-09-06). "Venita Blackburn Captures the Wonder, and Danger, of Young Womanhood". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  21. ^ "Staff Picks: Melancholia, Music, and Meaning by The Paris Review". The Paris Review. 2021-07-30. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  22. ^ "18 New Books Coming in January". The New York Times. December 29, 2023. Retrieved June 11, 2025.
  23. ^ Byas, Taylor (2024-07-04). "The Collective, Futuristic 'We' in 'Dead in Long Beach, California'". Alta Online. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  24. ^ Kearse, Stephen (2024-01-21). "Review | Her brother dies. And then she assumes his identity.". Washington Post. Archived 2024-01-21 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  25. ^ Rubino, Stef (2024-01-22). ""Dead in Long Beach, California" and the Inevitability of Grief". Autostraddle. Retrieved 2025-06-10.
  26. ^ Milks, Megan (2024-01-20). "She's Posing as Her Dead Brother. It's Just Part of the Grieving Process.". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2025-06-10.
  27. ^ "Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  28. ^ "Venita Blackburn | Contributors | Gagosian Quarterly". Gagosian. 2024-05-31. Retrieved 2025-06-11.
  29. ^ McQueen, Daven (2024-01-24). "Venita Blackburn on Grief and How We Live With It". Autostraddle. Archived 2025-06-11 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2025-06-10.
  30. ^ Davis, Sara (Oct 13, 2023). "Kind of Miraculous: PW Talks with Venita Blackburn". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 2025-06-10.
  31. ^ "College of Arts and Humanities". cah.fresnostate.edu. Archived 2025-06-11 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2025-06-10.
  32. ^ "Instagram". www.instagram.com. Retrieved 2025-06-10.
  33. ^ "The 2018 Finalists For The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize For Debut Fiction Are All Women For The First Time Ever". Bustle. 2018-01-25. Archived 2022-12-04 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2025-06-09.