Black Excellence: Bryan Washington
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/bryan-washington
Bryan Washington is a fiction writer capturing the fragile beauty of modern relationships in stories shaped by place, memory, and the quiet rituals of daily care. His novels and short stories feature queer men of color and their inherited and chosen families as they live alongside one another—sometimes gently, sometimes painfully. He writes in a style that is deceptively spare, and he develops characters primarily through dialogue marked by awkward silences and questions left unanswered. Across a short story collection and three novels, Washington offers a vivid and compassionate vision of how people stumble home to one another.