Forum on the Humanities and the Public World

Hilton Als, theater critic and staff writer for The New Yorker
“Two Views: James Baldwin”

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Born in Brooklyn in 1961, Als currently resides in Manhattan. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section, Als joined the magazine's staff in 1996 and became one of its theater critics in 2002. In 1997 he won first place in two categories in the New York Association of Black Journalists Awards: Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2000 for creative writing.

A former staff writer for The Village Voice and a former editor-at-large at Vibe, Als has written as well for The Nation. He has written film scripts for Swoon and Looking for Langston and edited the catalogue for the Whitney Museum of American Art's exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art in 1994. His first book, The Women (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), was a meditation on gender and race and their roles in the forging of personal identity. He co-edited (with Darryl Turner) White Noise: The Eminem Collection and is co-writer (with Turner) of Don't Explain, a screenplay being produced by Christine Vachon at Killer Films.

Als was the recipient of the 2002-03 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. The Nathan committee, consisting of the chairs of the English departments of Cornell, Princeton, and Yale Universities, who were assisted by experts on the theater from those same schools, describe Als's work: &lquot;Whether he's discussing the latest directorial interpretation of Gypsy, the formidable acting talent on display in Vincent in Brixton, or the Harlem Renaissance background of Langston Hughes's Little Ham, Hilton Als offers his audience a lively mix of information and opinion in a literate style that cannot help but contribute to intelligent play-going.&rquot;

Als was a 2007 fellow at the San Francisco Art Institute's Center for Word, Text, and Image, and is currently Joan Leiman Jacobson Professor in Nonfiction Writing at Smith College.

Links

New Yorker blog
New Yorker Articles and Reviews
“A Weeklong Journal of a Writer” (Slate, 16 Feb 2004)
“The Searcher” (The Nation, 12 July 2004)
“Girls and Guns” (The New York Review of Books, 27 March 2003)
“Notes on Grey Gardens” (Criterion Collection essays)
“Family Secrets” (PEN American Center lecture)