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Carvell Wallace is a writer and podcaster who has contributed to The New Yorker, GQ, New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, MTV News, and Al Jazeera. Their debut memoir, Another Word For Love (MCD, 2024), explores their life, identity, and love through stories of family, friendship, and culture and is a Kirkus Finalist in Nonfiction and a winner of the PEN Oakland prize. They were a 2019 Peabody Award nominee, a 2022 National Magazine Award Finalist, a 2023 winner of the Mosaic Prize in Journalism, a 2025 UCross Fellow, and a winner of the 2026 Whiting Prize in nonfiction. They live in Oakland.

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Carvell Wallace is a New York Times Bestselling author, memoirist, and award-winning podcaster who covers race, arts, culture, film and music for a wide variety of news outlets. He is a regular long form contributor to the New York Times Magazine where his profile of Riz Ahmed was a cover story in August 2018. They have additionally written cover profiles on Michael B. Jordan for Rolling Stone, Mahershala Ali for GQ and Samuel L. Jackson for Esquire. Other high-profile subjects have included Tarell Alvin McCraney for the New York Times, Viola Davis for Glamour, G-Eazy for MTV and Steph Curry for the New Yorker.

Their 2024 memoir Another Word For Love has been hailed by the New York Times as having “great beauty, teeth and vulnerability….funny and heartbreaking, religiously vivid and lovingly open.” James McBride called it “a remarkable book by one of the finest young writers I’ve come across in many years,” and Publisher’s Weekly said the prose was “Stunning…virtuosic—but never indulgent”

They received the 2023 recipient of the American Mosaic Prize in Journalism for the essay What if My Mother Had an Abortion and their exploration of Black Horror for The Atlantic.

In 2019 Wallace published The Sixth Man, co-written with Golden State Warrior’s forward Andre Iguodala. The memoir of Iguodala’s life in basketball — released on Dutton press —- spent four weeks on the Times bestseller list for Hardcover Non-fiction, 14 weeks on the Sports Non-fiction list, and made Barack Obama’s year end list of favorite books.

Their 2017 podcast Closer Than They Appear explored race and identity in America and won a Radio Television Digital News Award for the episode in which Carvell returns to their hometown to see a childhood friend for the first time in 27 years. Their 10-episode podcast Finding Fred which focused on Fred Rogers teachings and their use within systems of oppressions, was named #1 podcast of 2019 by The Atlantic and was nominated for a Peabody Award

They have contributed to Pitchfork, ESPN The Magazine, The Guardian, and MTV News where they worked as a music columnist alongside Doreen St. Felix, Hanif Abrurraqib, Brian Phillips, Ira Madison, Jessica Hopper, and others during the fabled but short-lived 2016 re-invigoration of the platform. According to the Columbia Journalism Review Wallace “dips in and out of popular culture and sports journalism with seemingly effortless fluency and writes about familiar topics and makes them feel new.”

In addition to work on culture and entertainment, Wallace has composed several notable longform reported memoirs including a 2016 effort for the now defunct The Toast which explored the origins of the Green Book as a meditation on migration, race and homelessness among the black population. His 2017 piece for MTV News “The Roots Of Cowboy Music” saw Wallace attending a cowboy poetry festival in the Nevada mountains and using the experience as an entrée into exploring isolation, loneliness, and the forgotten histories of black people. And his 2017 New Yorker work on the end of Barack Obama’s presidency was noted in 2018’s Best American Essays.

Before writing professionally, Carvell spent fifteen years in youth non-profit doing direct case management and program design for youth populations in incarceration, and foster care. They are a graduate of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and hold a B.F.A. in Theatre from the Tisch School at New York University.

They live in Oakland California and are the parent to two adult teenagers.