About Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronxbegan as a story for Rolling Stone about the trial of the 20-year-old drug dealer named Boy George. In the courtroom, LeBlanc met his girlfriend, Jessica; for the next eleven years, Jessica, her extended family and friends became the heart of LeBlanc’s life. She chronicles that decade in Random Family, an account of the day-to-day realities of urban poverty. This contemporary classic of immersion journalism as been described as a “nonfiction Middlemarch of the underclass” (The Los Angeles Times) and the “literary equivalent of a 100-mile dash” (The Washington Post). It was also selected by the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, and Knoxville News-Sentinel as one of the “Best Books of 2003.” Random Family won the 2003 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. A National Book Critics Circle non-fiction finalist, it was also short-listed for the International Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage.
LeBlanc’s work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Esquire and The Village Voice, among others. She holds a B.A. in Sociology from Smith College, an M.Phil in Modern Literature from Oxford University, and a Master’s of Legal Studies from Yale Law School. The recipient of numerous awards including the Ron Ridenhour Prize, a Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe, and a Soros Media Fellowship from the Open Society Institute, LeBlanc is currently a Visiting Scholar at New York University and on the faculty of the Columbia Journalism School.