Colin Channer was born on October 13, 1963, as the youngest of four children. His father was a policeman and his mother worked as a pharmacist. Channer was just six years old when his father left the family and died when Channer was twelve. In one of the articles, Colin articulates his deep love, respect, and admiration for his mother who taught him he was "born with both male and female energies," and that he "needed to explore both of them to live an authentic life."
Colin Channer was initially educated in Jamaica. He attended Ardenne high school and then went to Meadowbrook high school. Already during the schooldays, Channer started to practice writing - it began with creating love letters to girls who didn’t like him.
In 1982, after graduation, Colin moved to New York. There he enrolled at Hunter College to earn a bachelor's degree in Media Communications.
In 1988 Colin Channer moved to Atlanta where he worked as a magazine journalist. After three years, he returned to New York and took on writing. Since his first works didn't have overnight success, he also served as a freelance copyeditor working for various agencies.
Finally, in 1998 Channer published his first novel Waiting in Vain which was selected as a Critic’s Choice by The Washington Post. In this novel, set in London, New York, and Jamaica, Channer explores the issues of friendship, love, romance, and homosexuality. In 2002 Colin released one more work from that early period of writing which also became a best-seller, Satisfy My Soul. A reviewer of the book for the African American Literature Book Club commented: "The novel is a towering castle of raw emotions, probing love and its many shades of angst, confusion, supreme happiness, painful insecurities, and betrayals. With its complex layering of race, spirituality, self-identity, and self-love, and with characters that are fully rounded and engaging, the novel is far from a standard boy-meets-girl romance."
In addition to writing, Channer is the founder and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival and is an educator. He was an assistant professor of English and the coordinator of the B.A. creative writing program at Medgar Evers College and has served as Newhouse Professor in Creative Writing at Wellesley College, as Fannie Hurst Writer in Residence at Brandeis University and as Visiting Artist in Residence at Columbia College Chicago.
Besides, in 2001 Channer became co-creative director of an online retailer of global handicrafts Eziba. Later, he founded his own design and branding firm, Squad 1962, that was retained by Island Outpost.
(From the galleries of Soho to the brownstones of Brooklyn...)
1998(Set in the Caribbean and the United States, the stories s...)
2006(Playwright Carey McCullough is a close guardian of his pr...)
2002(It's a sexy, witty collection of connected stories set on...)
2009Christened in the Anglican Church and involved in the Evangelical church as a teen, Channer considers himself a secular Rastafarian.
Quotations:
"My art, my existence as a novelist, is a public exploration of my inner life. I write not to discover myself but to write myself into being. Through my fiction, I am attempting to create mosaics of masculinity - male characters who’ve improvised a life of joy and simple beauty from the shards of their inheritance."
"The problem with women will not be solved until men imagine their way into wholeness. And in this regard, writers of both sexes have a role to play. We can begin by writing from a deeper part of ourselves. Too many of us are writing from the surface. Too many of us are writing stories populated by predictable, cliched, and inauthentic men - characters who offer little insight into the fundamental challenge facing men of the twenty-first century: how to create from inside our souls a life of harmony, composed of both selves."
"Study hard. Learn the rules then take a chance on breaking them."
Channer writes slowly and creates characters he enjoys spending time with.
Quotes from others about the person
Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing: "Colin Channer is a wonderfully funny, piercing, crafty and compassionate writer."
Z.Z. Packer, author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere: "No one describes the wonders and aches of love as sensuously as Colin Channer."
Colin Channer has two children, Makonnen and Addis.
