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Gabriel Bump

Biography

Gabriel Bump

Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His debut novel, EVERYWHERE YOU DON'T BELONG, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2020 and has won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Fiction, the Heartland Booksellers Award for Fiction, and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's First Novelist Award. Bump teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Gabriel Bump

Books by Gabriel Bump

Don't Stop Snowing
by Gabriel Bump - Family Life, Fiction, Friendship
Fresh out of grad school in Michigan, on the brink of despair, directionless, David worries his parents. They don't know how to heal him. His doctor suggests that he needs to gain some perspective, and possibly a relocation would help. Maybe there is such a thing as a geographical cure? Snowy, grey Buffalo is not the first place that comes to mind when you think of a curative place, but maybe time with his cousin Flip will help David to forget his own troubled past. But as it turns out, Flip's life and state of mind is even unsteadier than his own. Suddenly enlisted to take care of his cousin and to even fill in for him at his job, David falls into a new life and a new way of seeing the world. A world where, come to think of it, he doesn't mind the snow.
The New Naturals
by Gabriel Bump - Fiction

An abandoned restaurant on a hill off the highway in Western Massachusetts doesn't look like much. But to Rio, a young Black woman bereft after the loss of her newborn child, this hill becomes more than a safe haven --- it becomes a place to start over. She convinces her husband to help her construct a society underground, somewhere everyone can feel safe, loved and accepted. Soon their utopia begins to take shape and attracts the unhoused, the disillusioned and the spiritually lost. But no matter how much these people all yearn for a sanctuary from the existential dread of life above the surface, what happens if this new society can't actually work?

Everywhere You Don't Belong
by Gabriel Bump - Fiction

Claude McKay Love is an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth. 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.