Hilton Als
| Hilton Als | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1960 (age 63–64) New York City, New York, United States |
| Occupation | Writer, critic |
Hilton Als (born 1960) is an African-American writer and critical theorist who is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of writing at Columbia University and a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker magazine. Als is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and former editor-at-large at Vibe magazine.
Background and career
Als was born in New York City, with roots in Barbados.[1]
His 1996 book The Women focuses on his mother (who raised him in Brooklyn), Dorothy Dean, and Owen Dodson, who was a mentor and lover of Als.[2][3][4] In the book, Als explores his identification of the confluence of his ethnicity, gender and sexuality, moving from identifying as a "Negress" and then an "Auntie Man", a Barbadian term for homosexuals.[4] His 2013 book White Girls continued to explore race, gender, identity in a series of essays about everything from the AIDS epidemic to Richard Pryor's life and work.
Als received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2000 for creative writing and the 2002–03 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.[5] In 2004 he won the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, which provided him half a year of free working and studying in Berlin.[6] He has taught at Smith College, Wesleyan, and Yale University, and his work has also appeared in The Nation, The Believer, and the New York Review of Books.
In June 2020, Als was named an inaugural Presidential Visiting Scholar at Princeton University for the 2020-2021 academic year. At Princeton, he will teach "Yaass Queen: Gay Men, Straight Women, and the Literature, Art, and Film of Hagdom", a course offered by the Program in Theater, the Program in Creative Writing, and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Awards and honors
- 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism) shortlist for White Girls[7][8]
- 2016 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Nonfiction)[9]
Bibliography
<templatestyles src="Module:Hatnote/styles.css"></templatestyles>
References
External links
- 1960 births
- 20th-century American writers
- 21st-century American writers
- African-American non-fiction writers
- American theater critics
- Guggenheim Fellows
- LGBT African Americans
- LGBT writers from the United States
- Living people
- Smith College faculty
- The New Yorker critics
- The New Yorker staff writers
- The New Yorker people
- Date of birth missing (living people)
- Lambda Literary Award winners
- The Village Voice people
