Kai Bird, the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, announced today the award of five resident fellowships at the Graduate Center, including the sixth Leon Levy/Alfred P. Sloan fellow for a biography on a figure from science. Mr. Bird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, is most recently the author of The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. Oppenheimer, the global blockbuster motion picture version of his biography of Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, won seven Academy Awards, including the Best Picture. The Leon Levy Center for Biography is hosted by the Graduate Center at the City University of New York—and generously funded by the Leon Levy Foundation. Each resident fellow receives a $72,000 grant, research assistance, writing space and full access to research facilities. The five Leon Levy Biography fellows, including the Levy/Sloan fellow, for 2024 – 2025:
Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio. Bernard is the winner of the 2020 Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Her previous works include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship, which was chosen by the New York Public Library as a Book for the Teen Age. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Bernard will be working on a biography of Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen, which will be published in the Yale Black Lives series.
Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of six books, most recently The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, And The American City which won The American Bar Association’s book award (the Silver Gavel); won The American Society of Journalists and Authors nonfiction book award; and was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for excellence in journalism. Among his other books are The Catcher Was A Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg; In The Country of Country: A Journey To The Roots of American Music; and The Fly Swatter: Portrait of an Exceptional Character, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Berlin Prize fellow of the American Academy, an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, and an Art For Justice Fellow. Dawidoff will be working on a biography of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, which will be published by Penguin-Random House.
Levy/Sloan Fellow Nicholas Kulish is writing a biography of software pioneer and philanthropist Bill Gates, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. As a foreign correspondent and investigative reporter for The New York Times, he has filed dispatches from more than 40 countries around the world, on topics ranging from Saudi royal finances to the Navy’s SEAL Team 6. Kulish has published a novel about the Iraq invasion, Last One In, and co-authored a history of Nazi hunting, The Eternal Nazi. He has covered antitrust for The Wall Street Journal and philanthropy for The Times, experiences he will draw on in writing his biography of Gates.
Stephen Phillips is a freelance writer. His work has appeared in print in The Times Literary Supplement, Economist, Spectator, Wall Street Journal and Smithsonian among other publications and online in The Atlantic. He is a former US Correspondent for The Times Educational Supplement and contributor to The Times Higher Education Supplement. As a Leon Levy Fellow he will complete a biography of political essayist and commentator Christopher Hitchens, to be published by W.W. Norton.
Mike Rezendes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with the global investigations team at The Associated Press. His recent work includes an examination of child sex abuse in the Mormon Church and financial corruption in the Catholic Church. In 2022, he worked on the ABC-TV drama “Alaska Daily,” starring Hilary Swank. He is writing a biography of the late Jimmy Breslin, the legendary New York reporter who gave voice to the powerless and helped create the New Journalism, to be published by Simon & Schuster. Mike worked for The Boston Globe Spotlight Team where he shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one for revealing the cover-up of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, and one for covering the bombing of the Boston Marathon. Mike was running the marathon when the bombs exploded and worked into the night covering the tragedy. In 2015, Mike was played by Mark Ruffalo in the Academy Award-winning movie, “Spotlight,” which won the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Screenplay.