Pinckney grew up in a middle-class African-American family in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended local public schools. He was educated at Columbia University in New York City.[1]
Some of Pinckney's first professional works were theatre texts, plays developed in collaboration with director Robert Wilson.[2] These included the produced works of The Forest (1988) and Orlando (1989). Pinckney returned to theatre with Time Rocker (1995).[3]
His first novel was High Cotton (1992), a semi-autobiographical novel about "growing up black and bourgeois" in 1960s America. His second novel was Black Deutschland (2016), about a young gay black man in Berlin in the late 1980s, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.[4]
Pinckney has published several collections of essays covering topics such as African-American literature, politics, race, and other cultural issues. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Granta, Slate, and The Nation. He frequently explores issues of racial and sexual identities, as expressed in literature and society.[citation needed]
Pinckney is gay[10] and lives with his partner, English poet James Fenton; the couple has been together since 1989.[11] Pinckney currently lives in New York City, but previously lived with Fenton in Oxfordshire, England.[12]
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