Jason Mott

Jason Mott is a novelist and poet who lives in southeastern North Carolina. He earned a BFA in fiction and an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and published two collections of poetry before turning to the novel.

His first novel, The Returned, imagines a world in which people who have died begin coming back to their families, and its television rights were optioned soon after publication. He followed it with The Wonder of All Things, about a young girl with a mysterious ability to heal. Hell of a Book (2021), a comic and searching novel about a Black author on a book tour who is shadowed by a boy who may be imaginary, won the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction.

His fiction often uses touches of the fantastic to explore grief, family, race and what it means to be Black in America.