Darryl Pinckney
Darryl Pinckney, a long-time contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of two novels, High Cotton (1992) and Black Deutschland (2016), and three works non-fiction, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002), Blackballed: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy (2014), and Busted in New York and Other Essays (2019). Blackballed is Pinckney's meditation on a century and a half of participation by Black people in US electoral politics and outlines the struggle for voting rights from Reconstruction through to the civil rights movement to Obama's two presidential campaigns and the new edition contains an essay reflecting on last summer's protests. In several of the essays in Busted in New York, Pinckney witnesses events in the streets, from the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., to Black Lives Matter resistance in Ferguson, Missouri five years ago, and explores the shifting consciousness in the history of Black identity.