The Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has announced that Dr. Brenda Wineapple will serve as its new director. Wineapple is known for her remarkable achievements as author, biographer, scholar, and teacher. Her most recent book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf, 2008), was a Washington Arts Club National Award winner, a New York Times “Notable Book,” a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, and was named best nonfiction of 2008 by The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Economist, among other publications.
Previously, Wineapple taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and most recently, in the MFA programs at The New School and Columbia University. Her other books include Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner; Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein; and Hawthorne: A Life, which received the Ambassador Award of the English-Speaking Union for the Best Biography of 2003 and the Julia Ward Howe Prize from the Boston Book Club. Her essays and reviews regularly appear in such publications as The New York Times and The Nation, and her recent essay “Her Own Society,” published in The American Scholar, is the recipient of a 2009 Pushcart Prize. Wineapple has also received a Guggenheim fellowship, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.