The MFA Creative Writing Program is thrilled to welcome Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and author, and New Yorker Magazine theater critic Hilton Als as the 2022 Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence. Please join us for the first of Als’s presentations, an interview with Brian Evenson, Creative Writing Program Director and Faculty. Event is free and open to the public.
Hilton Als began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, writing pieces for ‘The Talk of the Town.' He became a staff writer in 1994, theater critic in 2002, and lead theater critic in 2012. Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. His first book, The Women, was published in 1996. In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim for creative writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03. His book, White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014, discusses various narratives of race and gender. White Girls also won the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Non-fiction. In 2016, Als received the Lambda Literary’s Trustee Award for Excellence in Literature and the Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction. In 2017 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and in 2018 the Langston Hughes Medal. In 2020 he was named an inaugural Presidential Visiting Scholar at Princeton University for 2020-21. In 2021 he was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Als is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He lives in New York City.