Sellout (Beatty) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Brooklyn College; M.A., Boston University;
• Currently—New York, New York


Paul Beatty is a contemporary American author. He received his MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an MA in psychology from Boston University. He is a 1980 graduate of El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, California.

Poetry
In 1990, Paul Beatty was crowned the first ever Grand Poetry Slam Champion of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. One of the prizes for winning that championship was a book deal—which resulted in his first volume of poetry, Big Bank Takes Little Bank.

This was followed by another book of poetry Joker, Joker, Deuce and appearances performing his poetry on MTV and PBS (in the series The United States of Poetry).

In 1993, he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

Fiction
His first novel, The White Boy Shuffle received a positive review in the New York Times, whose reviewer, Richard Bernstein, called the book "a blast of satirical heat from the talented heart of black American life."

His second book, Tuff received a positive notice in Time magazine. In 2006, Beatty edited an anthology of African-American humor called Hokum and wrote an article in the New York Times on the same subject.

His 2008 novel Slumberland was about an American DJ in Berlin.

In The Sellout, released in 2015, Beatty returns to Los Angeles, to a fictional neighborhood called Dickens, for this novel about an urban farmer who tries to spearhead a return to slavery and segregation.  (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/17/2015.)