ERNEST BRAWLEY is a native Californian.  His father was a prison guard, and he was raised on the grounds of several penitentiaries.  He worked his way through college as a forklift driver at a tomato packing shed, a switchman on the Southern Pacific Railroad, and as a guard at San Quentin Prison, where he saw duty in the Gun Towers, the Big Yard and Death Row.  He attended the University of California at Santa Barbara and San Francisco State University, where he was granted several writing scholarships and a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing.  Since then, he has spent his life writing, teaching and traveling the world.  He has taught at the University of Hawaii, Hunter College, New York University and the Pantheon-Sorbonne.  He has lived and worked in Argentina, Spain, France, Italy, England, India, Thailand and Japan.  He is a recipient of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature and served for several years on the Fiction Award Committee of the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington.

Learn more about Brawley's novels THE RAP and SELENA.

@ernestobrawley