Background and career
Trey Ellis (born 1962) is an American novelist, screenwriter, professor, playwright, and essayist. He was born in Washington D.C. and graduated from Hopkins School and Phillips Academy, Andover, where he studied under Alexander Theroux before attending Stanford University, where he was the editor of the Stanford Chaparral and wrote his first novel, Platitudes in a creative writing class taught by Gilbert Sorrentino. He is a professor of Professional Practice in the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University.
Ellis's first novel, Platitudes, was published in 1988 and reissued by Northeastern University Press in 2003, along with his 1989 essay "The New Black Aesthetic". Platitudes follows the story of Earle, a black, private high-school student in New York City. The novel itself wrestles with many concepts outlined in "The New Black Aesthetic," namely the existence of the cultural mulatto. Earle, as a second generation middle-class, black nerd, embodies this identity—on his visit to Harlem he feels entirely out of place. Alongside this narrative is the story of Dorothy, a black student at a private high school who lives in Harlem, yet can navigate easily in her mostly white social circles. The novel makes extensive use of structure. Largely a metafictional work, Ellis moves between a more post-modern, deconstructed style and a more traditional, black female style through the voices of fictional authors Wellington and Ishee Ayam. Ellis' exaggerated representations of each style is humorous, essentially complicating the hegemonic artistic voice of the Black Arts Movement. As a black nerd, Earle complicates traditional ideas of black masculinity. He occupies a place as an intellectual outsider, excluded from the mainstream, and yet the nerd identity is hyper-white. This idea of how blackness can be diverse and differ from typical ideas blackness accurately depict what the NBA is trying to say. Ellis is also the author of the novels Home Repairs (1993) and Right Here, Right Now (1999), which received an American Book Award. His latest book is Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood (2008), a memoir of his life as a single father of two.
His work for the screen includes the Peabody Award-winning and Emmy-nominated The Tuskegee Airmen, and Good Fences, starring Danny Glover and Whoopi Goldberg, which was shortlisted for the PEN award for Best Teleplay of the year, and was nominated for a Black Reel award. In 1994, he co-wrote The Inkwell under the pen name Tom Ricostronza.
His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Playboy, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and GQ, among other places. He is a regular blogger on The Huffington Post and lives in Manhattan, where he is an associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Film.
His work for the theater includes the plays Fly, Satchel Paige and the Kansas City Swing and Holy Mackerel. Holy Mackerel had its first staged reading in 2016. The play follows the evolution of The Amos 'n' Andy Show, which ran from the late 1920s to the late 1950s, and was a household favorite. Before it became a television show, it was America's most listened-to radio show. During the time, it was voiced by white actors, and the show was criticized for the way it "vilified [the characters] as modern-day Uncle Toms for wanting the same opportunities for success that their white counterparts took for granted". However Amos 'n' Andy also "introduc[ed] America to a range of black people who included doctors and lawyers, and depicted the black family at a time when no one else was doing so". When the show moved to television, they hired black actors. After only two seasons, the show was cancelled due to a boycott led by Walter White, head of the NAACP. In Ellis' own words, "When I discovered that everything I thought I knew about Amos 'n' Andy was wrong, that it was one of TV's first ever sitcoms and the all-black cast were some of the most brilliant comedians to ever walk the earth, I knew I had to bring their story back to life". 'Holy Mackerel!', the phrase the show invented, is a comedy about the tragedy of what happened to them."
Ellis is also known for the small piece he wrote titled "New Black Aesthetic" (NBA) which describes the change in the overall image of "blackness" that has emerged in American society in the past few decades. In this essay, Ellis argues that there is a broader way to characterize middle class blacks today, and with this new characterization comes a new aesthetic movement.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
