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 second Leon Levy/Alfred P. Sloan fellow for a biography on a figure from science. Mr. Bird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, is presently finishing his own project, a biography of President Jimmy Carter. 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 for 2020-21 are:
Nicholas Boggs is currently a clinical assistant professor in the Department of English at New York University. He earned a BA from Yale and a PhD from Columbia University. He is co-editor of James Baldwin’s collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (2018). He received the 2019 Robert and Ina Caro Travel and Research Fellowship from the Biographer’s International Organization. His writing has appeared in the anthologies James Baldwin Now and The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin. Boggs is working on a literary biography of James Baldwin, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Miriam Horn, this year’s Leon Levy/Alfred P. Sloan fellow, is the author of Rebels in White Gloves: Coming of Age with Hillary’s Class—Wellesley ‘69 (Random House 1999); the New York Times bestselling Earth: The Sequel, The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming (coauthored with Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp), (Norton, 2008); and Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman; Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland (Norton, 2016) which Kirkus named a Best Book of the Year. She is working on a biography of naturalist George Schaller, which will be published by Penguin.
Susan Morrison has been the Articles Editor of The New Yorker for twenty-two years. Previously, she served as Editor in Chief of The New York Observer, and was an original editor of SPY Magazine. Ms. Morrison is the editor of the book Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers, and she is at work on a biography of Lorne Michaels for Random House.
Lance Richardson is the author of House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row, which appeared on several “notable books” lists of 2018. His journalism has been published in print and online in The Guardian, Slate, The New Yorker, The Sydney Morning Herald, and several international iterations of GQ. Richardson is also the recipient of the 2020 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship. He is currently working on a biography of Peter Matthiessen — writer, naturalist, Zen roshi — to be entitled True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, which will be published by Pantheon.
Francesca Wade
Francesca Wade is an acclaimed literary critic who writes for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Paris Review, The Guardian and The New Statesman. She is editor of The White Review, and winner of the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize. Her first book, Square Haunting, was published in 2020 by Faber in the UK and Tim Duggan at Crown. Wade is working on a biography of Gertrude Stein.