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. She is best known for her 2003 non-fiction book Random Family, she spent a decade with heroin dealers and their girlfriends to write it. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship—popularly known as the "Genius Grant"—in 2006.
While at MacDowell in 2009, 2010, and 2015 she worked on Give It Up, a nonfiction book about the world of standup comedy to be published by Random House in 2011. She continued working on the project as the Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. The book was, at the time, 10 years in the making.
