Brontez Purnell (1982, AL) has been making art and music since the 90s. He stared in The Social Lies a hard-core Afro-punk duo in Alabama in his teens, and later Gravy Train!!! He then went on to lead his long-running project The Younger Lovers . He is also a dancer, filmmaker, choreographer (The Brontez Purnell DanceCompany), and author of 8 books. Brontez Purnell is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children’s book, the novel Since I Laid My BurdenDown, and, most recently, 100 Boyfriends, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, was long listed for the 2022 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the 2021 Brooklyn Public LibraryLiterary Prize, and was named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers’ Award for Fiction and the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Award, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Born in Triana, Alabama, he’s lived in Oakland, California, for twenty years. Purnell graduated with an MFA in Conceptual Art Practice fro UC Berkely and he is the recipient of the 2022 Robert Rauschenberg Award for Risk Taking in Art from the New York Foundation of Contemporary Art.