Selwyn Seyfu Hinds is a prolific and award-winning creator and storyteller — author, editor, music scribe, producer and screenwriter. Currently he is the showrunner and writer of the television adaptation of Esi Edugyan’s novel “Washington Black” for 20th Century Fox, with Sterling Brown and Anthony Hemingway attached. He also recently served as a writer/producer on Jordan Peele’s new iteration of the “Twilight Zone” for CBS All Access, penning the critically hailed episode “Replay,” starring Sanaa Lathan.
Selwyn’s current feature slate includes Legendary Entertainment’s adaptation of Ron Wimberly’s graphic novel, “Prince of Cats”— a story rooted in a wild mash-up of Shakespeare, hip-hop and samurai warrior culture — with Lakeith Stanfield attached to star and Zucker Productions producing; an adaptation of “Running A Thousand Miles For Freedom,” which he developed for actress Zendaya and sold to Big Beach Films; and a top secret project at DC-Warner Brothers that will get him carted off in the night by ninjas if he talks about it.
Selwyn’s storytelling life before screenwriting includes co-creating the Vertigo comic-book series, “Dominique Laveau: Voodoo Child”; serving as consulting producer of original programming and executive producer of News and Docs at BET Networks; penning two critically hailed non-fiction books, his memoir “Gunshots in My Cook-Up: Bits and Bites of a Hip-Hop Caribbean Life,” and “To a Young Jazz Musician: Letters from the Road,” written with Wynton Marsalis; and serving as editor-in-chief of “The Source” magazine during the late ’90s. Selwyn has also written for a wide-array of major American publications, including The New York Times, The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, USA Today, Spin and Vibe magazine, and his music essays have been collected in numerous anthologies.
Longtime DJ, poet, unrepentant shopaholic and sci-fi nerd, Selwyn got cracking on all those journeys as a kid back at Guyana’s Queens College, one of the most storied schools in the Caribbean, before later attending Princeton, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English and a certificate in African American studies. Selwyn is represented by The Gotham Group and Paradigm, and though he lives in Los Angeles, he remains a die-hard Brooklynite. His most significant accomplishment is being the father of a teenage girl.