Brit Bennett

Biography

Brit Bennett was born in 1990 in Southern California to a Black family with roots in Louisiana. She grew up in Oceanside, California, and attended Stanford and the University of Michigan's MFA program. Her debut novel, The Mothers (2016), also examined community, secrets, and Black womanhood. The Vanishing Half was her second novel and became a #1 New York Times bestseller and an instant literary landmark. Bennett has spoken about drawing on family stories of passing and on her own experience navigating light-skinned Black identity in America. At thirty, she wrote the most critically acclaimed novel about racial passing since Passing by Nella Larsen (1929).

Brit Bennett at a glance