Gabriel Bump

“Bump’s meditation on belonging and not belonging, where or with whom, how love is a way home no matter where you are, is handled so beautifully that you don’t know he’s hypnotized you until he’s done.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Gabriel Bump has established himself as a stunning talent to be reckoned with.” —Maaza Mengiste

Gabriel Bump is the author of The New Naturals (Algonquin, 2023), and Everywhere You Don’t Belong (Workman, 2020), a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2020 and an Electric Lit Favorite Novel of 2020. Bump’s debut novel follows protagonist Claude, a young Black man born on the South Side of Chicago and raised by his civil rights–era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He escapes Chicago to go to college, to find a new identity, and to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, there is no safe haven for a young Black man in this time and place called America.

Of the book, The Paris Review said, “A classic bildungsroman, made better by a lot of love for warts-and-all Chicago, and I see dashes of Percival Everett in Bump’s deadpan, how his characters cross the stage with a sashay (and sometimes more).” Author Tommy Orange called it, “A comically dark coming-of-age story about growing up on the South Side of Chicago, but it’s also social commentary at its finest, woven seamlessly into the work. Bump’s meditation on belonging and not belonging, where or with whom, how love is a way home no matter where you are, is handled so beautifully that you don’t know he’s hypnotized you until he’s done.”

Bump’s nonfiction and fiction have appeared in Slam magazine, the Huffington Post, Springhouse Journal, and other publications. He was awarded the 2016 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

He teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Short Bio

Gabriel Bump is the author of The New Naturals and Everywhere You Don’t Belong, which was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2020 and an Electric Lit Favorite Novel of 2020. Bump’s nonfiction and fiction have appeared in Slam magazine, the Huffington Post, Springhouse Journal, and other publications. He was awarded the 2016 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He grew up in South Shore, Chicago and now teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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The New Naturals

Novel, 2023

Drive by the abandoned restaurant on a hill off the highway in Western Massachusetts, and it doesn’t look like much. Definitely not a destination. But that’s exactly what it becomes, after a young Black Boston woman sees the country—in fact, the whole world—as an increasingly dangerous place. After losing their child and looking hard for a safe place, she and her husband begin to construct a separate society: somewhere nurturing, where everyone can feel loved and wanted, where all the Spike Lee movies play, where the children learn actual history—and somewhere underground, where they won’t need anything or anyone from the world above ground to make it work. She locates a Benefactor and soon it all begins to take shape. Two homeless men are told about the place and begin their journey by bus to get there. A young and disillusioned journalist stumbles upon it and wants in. And a former soccer player, having lost his footing in society, is persuaded to check out this place too. But it doesn’t take long for problems to develop, for conflicts to surface, for food to become scarce, for the children to crave life beyond this place. In a disarmingly original and perceptive novel, Gabriel Bump peels back the layers of lives lived all over the country today and asks, what if there was a a safe place for Black people, a kind of contemporary Quilombo? A remarkable feat of the imagination, The New Naturals is a fresh and timely story about the importance of community, for although their utopia cannot survive, the ties that bind these people to each other do. Bump shows us that, ultimately, it is our love for and connection to each other that will save us.

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Everywhere You Don't Belong

Novel, 2020

“A comically dark coming-of-age story about growing up on the South Side of Chicago, but it’s also social commentary at its finest, woven seamlessly into the work.” —Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review

In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn’t dangerous or brilliant—he’s an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home. Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights–era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America. Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don’t Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.

Read What’s in Print

• Ten Questions for Gabriel Bump – Poets & Writers

• A Comic Coming-of-Age Novel Laced With Social Commentary – New York Times

• Chicago’s Gabriel Bump named 2020 winner of the Ernest Gaines Award – Chicago Sun Times

Listen to Audio

• Born out of loss, 2 parents build their own underground society in The New Naturals – NPR

• The PEN Pod: Everywhere You Don’t Belong with Gabriel Bump – PEN America