Best-known for his popular mysteries featuring private investigator Easy Rawlins, Walter Mosley transcends the conventional bounds of fiction writing. The New York Times Book Review called him “a literary artist as well as a master of mystery.” The Boston Globe hailed him as “one of the nation’s finest writers.”

 Mosley’s novels depict the black experience as seen through the eyes of ordinary men. “Fully formed, complex black men have been absent from much of contemporary literature,” says Mosley. Imbued with dignity, insight and whatever strength they have, Mosley’s characters deal with what it means to be black and male in America while building a life of purpose and fulfillment.
 
With elegant yet economical prose, Mosley has crafted unforgettable characters: Easy Rawlins (the complex, fallible private investigator), Socrates Fortlow (the ex-con turned urban philosopher), Fearless Jones (the army veteran), Paris Minton (the shy bookstore owner) and “Mouse” (Easy’s now violent childhood friend).

His first Rawlins novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, was made into a film starring Denzel Washington. Other books in the series include the New York Times bestsellers, Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Black Betty, A Little Yellow Dog, Cinnamon Kiss, and Little Scarlet, which Publishers Weekly called “Mosley’s best novel to date” and “genre writing at its finest.” Mosley is adapting the novel for film.

Mosley is an active voice for the black community in the ongoing effort for racial equality. In his essays and nonfiction (What Next: A Memoir Towards World Peace, Workin’ on the Chain Gang, Life Out of Context), he examines ways that the African-American perspective can contribute to political, economic and social progress in America.

His other works include the blues novel, RL’s Dream; The Man in My Basement, a meditation on morality and justice; the sci-fi novels Blue Light, Futureland and The Wave; the Fearless Jones novels Fear Itself and Fear of the Dark; the young adult novel 47; and the novel Fortunate Son (April 2006), which Library Journal said “deserves to be on the shelves of every library.”
 

In December 2006 Mosley will publish Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistentialist Novel. In spring 2007 he releases This Year You Write Your Novel, a non-fiction guide for writers.

His short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy and GQ. One of the stories in Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned won an O’Henry Award. The book became an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne.

He is the founder of City Colleges’ pioneering publishing program. He is also the first African-American to sit on the National Book Foundation’s influential board of directors and currently serves on the boards of The Poetry Society of America and TransAfrica. In 2003 he hosted the National Book Awards.

Mosley has won numerous awards including a 2002 Grammy for the liner notes accompanying Richard Pryor’s And It’s Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings. In 2004 he was honored with the Sundance Risktaker Award and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award.