Brit Bennett: Neilly Series Lecture

Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, Brit Bennett’s mesmerizing first novel, The Mothers, is an emotionally perceptive story about community, love, and ambition.

By employing entrancing, lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a “what if” can be more powerful than an experience itself. If, as time passes, we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, to the communities that have parented us, and to the decisions we make that shape our lives forever.

Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work was featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, and Jezebel. She is one of the National Book Foundation’s 2016-5 Under 35 honorees.