Brit Bennett

Brit Bennett was born in Oceanside, California, where she spent the next 17 years of her life. Upon graduating from high school, she majored in English at Stanford University before pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the University of Michigan. She also briefly studied at Oxford, making her the first person in her family to leave the country. In 2014, Bennett wrote an article for Jezebel called “I Don’t Know What To Do With Good White People.” The piece was published in response to the fact that police officer Darren Wilson—who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—was not indicted for his crime. “I Don’t Know What To Do With Good White People” attracted millions of readers in only several days, spreading Bennett’s name throughout the literary community and beyond. Two years later, when she was just 26, Bennett published her debut novel, The Mothers, earning her a place on the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” list of breakout writers. Her second book, The Vanishing Half, was published in 2020 to wide acclaim.