Selwyn Seyfu Hinds is a prolific, award-winning creator and storyteller of all kinds—author, editor, music scribe, comics creator, producer, and screenwriter, to name a few Selwyn is executive producer, showrunner and creator of Hulu’s Washington Black, an adaptation of Esi Edugyan’s esteemed novel that the network snapped up following Selwyn’s red-hot pitch—with Sterling K. Brown and director Anthony Hemingway attached—and a three-way bidding war.
Selwyn is also writing AMC’s upcoming adaptation of Caldwell Turnbull’s novel The Lesson, an alien first contact thriller set in the US Virgin Islands. And he recently served as a writer/producer on Jordan Peele’s reboot of The Twilight Zone for CBS All Access, penning the critically hailed police brutality episode “Replay,” starring Sanaa Lathan, which made Selwyn a finalist in the Drama Teleplay category for the 2020 Humanitas Prize.
Selwyn’s other recent television highlights include serving as Consulting Producer on HBO Max’s DC universe anthology Strange Adventures and developing at HBO with George R.R. Martin. On the feature side, Selwyn’s recent slate includes Legendary Entertainment’s adaptation of the Ronald Wimberly graphic novel, Prince of Cats—a wild mash-up of Shakespeare, hip-hop, and samurai warrior culture; an adaptation of enslaved couple William and Ellen Craft’s true-life tale of extraordinary escape, Running A Thousand Miles For Freedom, which Selwyn developed for Big Beach Films and has Hanelle Culpepper set to direct; Arkham, a Gotham City set thriller for Jared Leto and DC/Warner Bros; and he’s also adapting the classic David Eddings fantasy series The Belgariad (over 20 million books sold) for City Hill Arts and Game of Thrones producer Vince Geradis.
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 its late-90s heyday. Selwyn’s also written for a wide array of major publications, including The New York Times, The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, USA Today, Spin, and Vibe Magazine, and his 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 University, where he received degrees in English and African-American Studies. But his most significant accomplishment is being the father of a teenage girl. Selwyn is represented by CAA and The
Gotham Group, and though he lives in LA, he remains a die-hard Brooklynite.