Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is an American journalist whose works focus on the marginalized members of society: adolescents living in poverty, prostitutes, women in prison, etc. LeBlanc grew up in a working class family in Leominster, Massachusetts. She studied at Smith College, Oxford, and Yale University. She worked for Seventeen Magazine as an editor after earning her Master's degree in Modern Literature at Oxford. LeBlanc's first book, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx, took more than 10 years to research and write. Random Family is a nonfiction account of the struggles of two women and their family as they deal with love, drug dealers, babies and prison time in the Bronx. LeBlanc and Random Family garnered several awards and nominations. Her research methods earned her a spot among several other journalists and nonfiction writers in Robert Boynton's book, The New New Journalism. LeBlanc has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, the Village Voice, and Esquire magazine. She currently lives in Manhattan.
Other publications
- "Gang Girl: When Manny’s Locked-Up" (August, 1994)
- "Landing From the Sky" (The New Yorker, April 23, 2000)
- "When the Man of the House is in the Big House" (Cover, January, 2003)
- "Sidelines" (About the work of Swiss artist Uwe Wittwer, in "Geblendet / Dazzled": Kehrer, Heidelberg, 2005)
- "'The Ground We Lived On': A Father's Last Days" (documenting the last months of her father's life, on NPR's All Things Considered, 2006)
Awards:
- Margolis Award (2000)
- Lettre Ulysses Award (2003)
- Borders Original Voices Award for Nonfiction
- MacArthur Fellow (2006)
