Current & Former Fellows

Emily Bernard

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

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.

Stephen Phillips

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

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.

Nicholas Kulish

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.

Donald Kizza-Brown

Donald Kizza-Brown is a postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at Brown University. He specializes in 20th-century Black American literature, and his essays on the way Black Southerners fought for the right to flourish in their region of birth even during the Great Migration have been published in Southern Cultures, Mississippi Quarterly, the Southern Historical Association, and various edited collections. Donald is working on a biography of Richard Wright, which will be published by Hanover Square Press.

Bill Goldstein

Bill Goldstein is writing a biography of Larry Kramer, to be published by Crown. He is the author of The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year that Changed Literature, published in 2017. He reviews books and interviews authors for NBC’s Weekend Today in New York, and was the founding editor of The New York Times books website. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Goldstein received a PhD in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He was a 2019-2020 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, and has received a Silvers Grant for Work in Progress from The Robert B. Silvers Foundation (2020) and the Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship from Biographers International Organization (2022).

Claire Hoffman

Claire Hoffman is the author of the reported memoir, Greetings from Utopia Park. As a journalist she has written for many magazines about culture, religion, celebrity, business, and more. A former staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone, she holds an MA in religion from the University of Chicago, an MS in journalism from Columbia University and an MFA from NYU. As a Leon Levy Fellow she will complete a biography of famed Hollywood evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Julie Phillips

Julie Phillips is the author of The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, on the convergence of writing, art, and maternal selfhood. Her previous book was the NBCC and Hugo Award-winning James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. Her work has appeared in The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Granta, Slate, and Lithub, and she is a regular contributor to 4Columns and the Dutch daily paper Trouw. She lives in Amsterdam and is working on a biography of Ursula K. Le Guin.

Michelle Frank

Levy/Sloan Fellow Michelle Frank is a writer focusing on the intersections between science, art, and social justice. She has held fellowships with the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine and the Arthur & Helen Whiteley Center. She is the recipient of grants from Humanities New York, the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics, and the CUNY Graduate Center’s Biography and Memoir Program. Her work has appeared in Scientific American and elsewhere. She is writing a biography of the twentieth century Chinese American particle physicist, Chien-Shiung Wu.

Nicholas Forster

Nicholas Forster is a lecturer in African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at Yale University. His essays on American cinema, race, performance, and archives have been published in Film Quarterly, Black Camera, liquidblackness, the Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Forster is working on a biography of the Black queer writer-director-actor Bill Gunn. Gunn was one of the first five directors hired by a major Hollywood studio and remains a foundational figure in the development of post-war theatre and film.

Jane Kamensky

Jane Kamensky is Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University and Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She is the author of numerous books, including A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (2016), which won four major prizes and was a finalist for several others. She serves as a Trustee of the Museum of the American Revolution, and as one of the leaders of Educating for American Democracy, a national initiative to transform K-12 history and civic instruction. At the Leon Levy Center, she’ll complete her next book, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below, to be published by W.W. Norton.

Avi Steinberg

Avi Steinberg is the author of three books of narrative nonfiction published by Knopf Doubleday. His new translation of the biblical story of David is forthcoming, and will be published by Liveright. He is a features writer for the New York Times Magazine, and a contributor to the culture desk of the New Yorker. At the Leon Levy Center, he will be working on a biography of writer and political activist Grace Paley.

Krithika Varagur

Krithika Varagur is an award-winning journalist and speechwriter. She has reported extensively from Southeast and South Asia and is the author of The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project (Columbia Global Reports, 2020). Her essays have been published in the London Review of Books, The New Republic, The Drift (where she is also an editor), and more. She is working on a group biography of the Princesses Duleep Singh, three Punjabi princesses who were born and raised in Victorian England, which is under contract with Penguin Press in the US and Viking in the UK.

Tatiana Brailovskaya

Levy/Sloan Fellow Tatiana Brailovskaya is executive editor of Faith for Earth—A Call for Action, published by the Parliament of the World’s Religions and the UN Environment Programme in 2020. She has published in the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Biology and has worked as a writer and media liaison for numerous environmental agencies, research institutions, and NGOs. Her forthcoming biography of early twentieth-century oceanographer Henry Bryant Bigelow, to be published by W. W. Norton & Company, is the story of the life and scientific legacy of one of the founders of ocean ecology.

Glenn Frankel

Glenn Frankel worked for many years at The Washington Post, winning a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. He taught journalism at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin, where he directed the School of Journalism. He has written five books, including three that have explored the creation of an iconic American movie and the historical era it reflects. His new project is a biography of Beatles manager Brian Epstein, who played a crucial role in the rise of the band that revolutionized popular culture.

Helen Koh

Helen Koh is a writer and researcher specializing in East Asian culture and history. She has been on the faculty of Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is currently Director of Creative GC Art Science Connect, an initiative that advances interdisciplinary research at The Graduate Center. Helen has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Japanese Ministry of Education. She is writing a biography of video artist and Fluxus founder Nam June Paik.

Dan Nadel

Dan Nadel is curator-at-large for the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis. His recent books include Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence 1945-1976 (Bad Dimension Press, 2020) and the upcoming It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940-1980 (New York Review Comics, 2021), which accompanies his forthcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago Comics, 1960 to Now. Nadel is writing the biography of the celebrated and controversial cartoonist Robert Crumb. 

Adam Shatz

Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. A former literary editor of The Nation magazine, he has been a visiting professor at Bard College and New York University and a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars. At the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Shatz will be writing a book about the Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon.

Rachel L.Swarns

Rachel L. Swarns is a journalist, author and professor who writes about race and race relations as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her articles about Georgetown University and its roots in slavery touched off a national conversation about American institutions and their ties to this painful period of history. She is the author of American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama (2012) and a co-author of  Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives [bit.ly] (2017).  Her forthcoming book, which will be published by Random House, is a multigenerational biography of an enslaved family torn apart by the 1838 slave sale that saved Georgetown from financial ruin. 

Patchen Barss

Patchen Barss is the author of the illustrated children’s book Flow Spin Grow: Looking for Patterns in Nature (OwlKids 2018), the editor of Conquering Space (Scientific American Classics, 2015), and the author of The Erotic Engine: How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg to Google (Random House, 2010). He has written for BBC Future, Scientific American, Nautilus, and The Walrus. He is working on a literary biography of mathematician and cosmologist Roger Penrose

Blair Asbury Brooks

Blair Asbury Brooks is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center.  Her dissertation, Heinz Berggruen: Dealing and Collecting Modern Art in the Shadow of World War II, is an art historical study of the life and career of the German-born dealer-collector.  Her dissertation research has been supported by the Frick Art Reference Library’s Center for the History of Collecting and the Getty Research Institute.  Previously, Brooks was Director of Exhibitions at Pace Gallery, then a Director at Peter Freeman, Inc. and Lisson Gallery.  She holds a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.A. from Columbia University.​

Nicholas Boggs

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. 

Susan Morrison

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

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.

Miriam Horn

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.

David Greenberg

David Greenberg, a Professor of History and of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, for a biography of civil rights icon John Lewis. Greenberg is the author of Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image and Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency, which won the George Orwell Award, the Kennedy School’s Goldsmith Book Award, and the Browne Book Award. Formerly an acting editor of the New Republic and a longtime contributor to Slate, he now writes regularly for Politico. He holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and a BA from Yale.

Channing Joseph

Channing Joseph, journalist and professor of journalism, for a biography of William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved African-American man who became the world’s first self-described “drag queen” in the 1880s. In 2016, Joseph was a fellow of the International Center for Journalists. Joseph’s articles have appeared in The New York Times, Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Atlantic. He has earned support for his independent journalism from the Ford Foundation, the Scripps Howard Foundation, and the Brooks and Joan Fortune Family Foundation. He teaches journalism at the University of Southern California.

Matthew McKnight

Matthew McKnight, a writer and editor, for a biography of the American writer and cultural theorist Albert Murray. McKnight is a graduate of Morehouse College and Georgetown University who recently worked as the assistant literary editor at The Nation. His own writing—about art, literature, and contemporary American life—has appeared in The Point, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The Baffler.

Abigail Santamaria

Abigail Santamaria, founding partner of Biography by Design, LLC, for a biography of Madeleine L’Engle, the beloved American author who transformed the landscape of possibility for women writers of science fiction and female protagonists. A graduate of the Columbia University MFA program in nonfiction, Santamaria has received fellowships from Jentel, Ragdale, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Santamaria is the author of Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis (2015).

Laura Snyder

Laura J. Snyder is the first Leon Levy/Alfred P. Sloan fellow, for a biography of Oliver Sacks.  Snyder is the author of three books, most recently Eye of the Beholder (2015), which won the 2016 Sally Hacker Prize of the Society for the History of Technology. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Magazine, and elsewhere.  She has a B.A. from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University. She was a philosophy professor at St. John’s College for twenty-one years. Snyder has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Phelim Dolan

The 2019-20 Dissertation Award of $25,000 has been won by Phelim Dolan for a dissertation on seventeenth-century protestant bishop Henry Jones (1605-82). A bishop, politician, writer, and landholder, Jones managed to thrive as conditions changed in one of Ireland’s most important and violent centuries. Dolan seeks to better understand how social networks functioned in early modern Europe by closely examining Jones’ life and career. Like the other Fellows, Dolan will have writing space in the Leon Levy Center and attend the monthly biography seminars.

Rebecca Donner

Rebecca Donner is the author of a novel, Sunset Terrace (MacAdam/Cage), and a graphic novel, Burnout(DC Comics). Her essays, reportage, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Reviewand Bookforum. A graduate of the Columbia University MFA Writing Program, Donner is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, Ucross Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. As a Leon Levy Fellow she will work on a biography of Mildred Harnack, an American literary scholar who was a leader of one of the largest anti-Nazi resistance groups in Germany, to be published by Little, Brown.

Stephen Heyman

Stephen Heyman spent much of his career at The New York Times, where he was most recently features editor of T Magazine. In addition to The Times, his articles about culture, travel, and design have appeared in Slate, Esquire, Travel & Leisure, Departures, Vogue and W. He now lives in Pittsburgh and is at work on a biography of Louis Bromfield, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lost Generation novelist and agricultural pioneer. The book will be published by W.W. Norton & Company.

Jennifer Homans

Jennifer Homans is the author of Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (2010). She is the Founder and Director of The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, where she is also a Distinguished Scholar in Residence. Homans was the Dance Critic for The New Republic for over a decade and has also written for the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. She holds a B.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Modern European History from New York University. She was a professional dancer and is currently working on a biography of George Balanchine.

Samanth Subramanian

Samanth Subramanian is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. His reportage has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, WIRED, Harper’s, and the Guardian, among other publications. His second book, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War(2014), won the 2015 Crossword Prize for Non Fiction and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Non Fiction Prize and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize the same year. He is working on a biography of the scientist J. B. S. Haldane.

Justin Gifford

Justin Gifford is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.  His research and teaching focuses on African American cultural history and American literature.  He is the author of two books, Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Publishing and Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim.  He is currently researching and writing a biography of Eldridge Cleaver.

Eleanor Randolph

Eleanor Randolph, a former member of The New York Times editorial board, is working on a biography of Michael Bloomberg, billionaire, politician and philanthropist. Ms. Randolph, a graduate of Emory University in Atlanta, has worked as a national correspondent for The Washington Post, covering the media, Moscow and New York City. She wrote a book on Russian life, “Waking the Tempests: Ordinary Life in the New Russia” published by Simon & Schuster in 1996.  As a national correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, she covered presidents and presidential campaigns,the  environment and New York City. In recognition of her editorials over 18 years at The Times, she was named one of the 50 most influential people over 50 in New York in 2016 by City & State Magazine.

Bruce Weber

In a 30-year career at The New York Times, Bruce Weber was an editor at the Sunday magazine, a metro reporter, a theater columnist and critic, the paper’s first national cultural correspondent and, for the final eight years of his tenure, an obituary writer. A former fiction editor at Esquire, he was the editor of Look Who’s Talking (1986), an anthology of 20^th-century American short stories. He is the author of Savion! My Life in Tap(with the dancer Savion Glover, 2000) As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires (2009), which became a New York Times bestseller, and a memoir, Life Is a Wheel: Love, Death, Etc., and a Bike Ride Across America (2014). A graduate of the University of Michigan with an M.A. in American literature from Columbia, he lives in Manhattan and Orient, N.Y. He is at work on a biography of E.L. Doctorow.

Lindsay Whalen

Lindsay Whalen began her career as a book editor, and is a graduate of Brooklyn College’s MFA in Fiction, where she was the recipient of a Truman Capote Fellowship and the 2015 Lainoff Short Story Prize. As a Leon Levy fellow, she will work on a biography of the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver, to be published by the Penguin Press.

Cynthia Carr

Cynthia Carr is the author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, winner of a Lambda Literary Award and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize; Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America; and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. She chronicled the work of contemporary artists as a Village Voice staff writer for two decades, and her work has appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She was awarded a Guggenheim in 2007. As a Leon Levy fellow she will work on a biography of the transgender actress Candy Darling, to be published by Flatiron Books. (Photo: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

Heather Clark

Heather Clark is a scholar and critic, and the author of The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972, and The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, both published by Oxford University Press. She earned her doctorate in English from Oxford University, and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the British Library. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. As a Leon Levy fellow, she will work on Sylvia Plath: The Light of the Mind, which will be published by Knopf.

Aidan Levy

Aidan Levy is the author of Dirty Blvd.: The Life and Music of Lou Reed, published by Chicago Review Press in 2015. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Village Voice, JazzTimes, and Blue Note Records Spotlight. He is a doctoral student at Columbia University in the Department of English and Comparative Literature with a subfield in jazz studies. He performs in the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance program at Columbia and is the baritone saxophonist in the Stan Rubin Orchestra. As a Leon Levy fellow he will work on a biography of the pioneer jazz musician Sonny Rollins.

Adam Plunkett

Adam Plunkett has written about poetry for a number of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Poetry Foundation, Design Observer, The Point, The Nation, n+1, and The New Republic, where he worked as the assistant literary editor. As a Leon Levy fellow, he will work on a critical biography of Robert Frost, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Colin Asher

Colin Asher is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. He teaches reading and writing as an Instructor at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, and was a 2014 fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts in nonfiction literature. Asher’s essay “But Never a Lovely So Real,” a profile of Nelson Algren, winner of the first National Book Award and the author of eleven books, was recently included in Read Harder, an anthology of the best Believer essays of the past five years. As a Leon Levy fellow he worked on a biography of Algren, which will be published by W.W. Norton & Co. (Photo: Andrew A. Nelles)

Blake Gopnik

Blake Gopnik is a regular contributor to the New York Times and a frequent guest on Marketplace radio. His Daily Pic column goes out to his many Tumblr and Twitter followers and ArtnetNews.com, where he is Critic at Large. Gopnik earned a PhD in art history from Oxford, and in Canada he was the editor of Insite, the architecture and design magazine, and art critic at The Globe and Mail. For ten years he was chief art critic of The Washington Post, before becoming art and design critic for Newsweek and its Daily Beast website. As a Leon Levy fellow he worked on Andy Warhol: A Life as Art, the first comprehensive biography of the Pop artist, which will be published by HarperCollins/Ecco.

Gordon-Dana Grozdanić

Gordana-Dana Grozdanić is a lecturer at the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia, where she teaches German and Eastern European literatures and German language. In her first book, ´Vor unserer Haustür.´ Auseinandersetzungen deutschsprachiger Autoren mit dem Jugoslawienkrieg, 1991-1996 [At Our Doorsteps.´ The Yugoslav War in the German-speaking Literature], she explored how German speaking authors grappled with the secession wars in the former Yugoslavia. Her interests include recent Central and South European literature, literary encounters between the German-speaking and South Slavic cultures, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian exile and war literature. As a Leon Levy fellow she worked on a biography of Zija Dizdarević, the Bosnian interwar writer, whose short stories she is translating into English.

Eric K. Washington

Eric K. Washington is an independent historian and the author of Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem, which prompted an exhibition at City College, CUNY, where he has taught in the Adult and Continuing Education program. Washington received the Municipal Art Society’s 2010 MASterworks Award for his interpretive signage in West Harlem Piers Park, and he is a fellow in Columbia University’s Community Scholars Program. His articles, talks and tours on Upper Manhattan have appeared in numerous print, online, podium and curbside forums, and he is featured prominently in Phillip Lopate’s Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan, and Jonathan R. Wynn’s The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York. As a Leon Levy fellow he worked on a biography of James H. Williams, the former chief porter or “Red Cap” of Grand Central Terminal, which will be published by Liveright / W.W. Norton & Company.

Esther Allen

Esther Allen is Associate Professor of Modern Languages at Baruch College, CUNY, where her research focuses on translation, 19th and 20th century Latin American and French literature, and issues in anglophone globalization. She has been a fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, and she is co-founder of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund and the PEN World Voices festival. She is co-editor of In Translation: Translators on their Work and What It Means, and she has translated works by Javier Marías, José Manuel Prieto, and many others. As a Leon Levy fellow she worked on a biography of José Martí, the Cuban writer and political activist whose Selected Writings she edited, translated, and annotated for Penguin Classics.

Peter Filkins

Peter Filkins is a poet and translator who teaches writing and literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and translation at Bard’s main campus. He is the author of four books of poetry, What She Knew, After Homer, Augustine’s Vision, and The View We’re Granted, and he has translated the collected poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, Songs in Flight, and her novels The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann. He has been a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and he has received awards from the American Literary Translators Association, the Austrian government, and DAAD, Fulbright, Marbach, and other fellowships. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. As a Leon Levy fellow, he worked on a biography of H.G. Adler, whose Holocaust novels The Journey, Panorama, and The Wall he has translated, all published by Random House. His biography of Adler will be published by Oxford University Press.

Ruth Franklin

Ruth Franklin is a book critic and contributing editor at The New Republic. She has written for many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Bookforum, Granta, and Salmagundi, to which she contributes a regular film column. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, was a finalist for the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature. She has been a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and received a Guggenheim fellowship in biography. As a Leon Levy fellow, she worked on a biography of the American writer Shirley Jackson, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, published in September 2016 by Liveright / W.W. Norton & Company.

James Romm

James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College, specializing in ancient Greek and Roman history. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, London Review of Books, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He edited the Landmark edition of Arrian’s Campaigns of Alexander, and he is the author of The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, Herodotus, Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire, and Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero. As a Leon Levy fellow he worked on a biography of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the Italian Renaissance philosopher.

Alexandra Chasin

Alexandra Chasin is Assistant Professor of Writing at Eugene Lang College, The New School, having earned a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford and an MFA at Vermont College. She is the author of a nonfiction work, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market, as well as two books of fiction: a collection of short innovative fictions entitled Kissed By, and Brief, an ‘app’ novella for the iPad. Chasin is a past recipient of a Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, a Bunting Institute Fellowship, and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. As a Leon Levy fellow she worked on a biography of Harry J. Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Her book Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger’s War on Drugs was published in October 2016 by the University of Chicago Press.

Andrew Meier

Andrew Meier is Assistant Professor of Writing at Eugene Lang College, The New School. He is the author of Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall, and The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service, both published by Norton and named books of the year by The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and NPR. He has reported on Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus for two decades, including as Moscow correspondent for Time, and is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine. Meier has received fellowships from the NEH, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation, and he was the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellow at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. As a Leon Levy fellow he worked on The House of Morgenthau: An American Family.

Pamela Newkirk

Pamela Newkirk is Professor of Journalism at New York University and the author of Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, which received the National Press Club Award for Media Criticism. She is the editor of A Love No Less: More Than Two Centuries of African American Love Letters, and Letters from Black America. Newkirk has worked as a daily journalist at four different news organizations, including New York Newsday, where in 1990 she was among the reporting team awarded a Pulitzer Prize for spot news. Her primary areas of interest are race in the news media and African American art and culture. As a Leon Levy fellow she worked on a biography of Ota Benga, the Congolese man exhibited at the Bronx Zoo. Her book Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga was published by Amistad / HarperCollins in July 2015.

Justin Spring

Justin Spring, a writer on 20th century American art and culture, is the author of two interdisciplinary biographies, Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art, and Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist and Sexual Renegade. Both biographies examine the lives of artists whose work combined the practice of visual art with literature, poetry, criticism, and social and political activism. Secret Historian was a National Book Award Finalist and the recipient of many other prizes. In addition to his work as a biographer, Spring is an award-winning curator who has published many monographs and museum catalogues, most recently Andy Warhol: Fame and Misfortune. As a Leon Levy fellow he worked on a biography of the Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta.

Susan Bernofsky

Susan Bernofsky has translated 18 books, including six by the Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, and novels by Jenny Erpenbeck, Yoko Tawada, Gregor von Rezzori, and others. She is Chair of the PEN Translation Committee and sits on the PEN board. She received the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize and the 2012 Calwer Hermann Hesse Translation Prize, as well as awards and fellowships from the American Council of of Learned Societies, the PEN Translation Fund, the NEA, the NEH, and the Lannan Foundation. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton, and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Washington University. She is also the author of Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe, and co-editor (with Esther Allen) of In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What it Means. Bernofsky has taught at Queens College, CUNY, and currently teaches literary translation in the MFA Writing Program of the Columbia University School of the Arts, where she serves as Director of Literary Translation. As a Leon Levy fellow she worked on a biography of Robert Walser, which will be published by Yale University Press. (Photo: Jacobia Dahm)

Langdon Hammer

Langdon Hammer, Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, earned his BA and PhD from Yale. A former Guggenheim fellow, he is the author of Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism, and editor of O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane, the Library of America’s Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters, and May Swenson: Collected Poems. His reviews of new poetry and literary criticism have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Raritan, andThe Yale Review, among other magazines, and he is poetry editor of The American Scholar. As a Leon Levy fellow he completed work on his biography James Merrill: Life and Art, published by Knopf in April 2015.

Siobhan Roberts

Siobhan Roberts is a Toronto journalist and author whose work focuses on mathematics and science. Her first book, King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, The Man Who Saved Geometry, won the Mathematical Association of America’s 2009 Euler Prize for expanding the public’s view of mathematics. She wrote and produced a documentary, The Man Who Saved Geometry, which aired on TVOntario’s The View from Here. Her second book, Wind Wizard: Alan Davenport and the Art of Wind Engineering, will be published by Princeton, and she is currently a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study. She has written for The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Canadian Geographic, The Mathematical Intelligencer, Leonardo, The New York Times, Smithsonian, and other publications. As a Leon Levy fellow she worked on her biography of the mathematician John Horton Conway, Genius at Play, published by Bloomsbury in July 2015.

Damion Searls

Damion Searls is the author of Everything You Say Is True, a travelogue, and What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, a collection of stories. He has written for Harper’s, The Believer, n+1, The Paris Review, Bookforum, Brick, and others, and is the editor of Thoreau’s The Journal: 1837-1861. He is an award-winning translator from German, French, Dutch, and Norwegian, including books by Proust, Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Keilson, and Nescio, as well as biographies of Anne Frank’s family and of Martin Kippenberger. His forthcoming translations include a collection of stories by Robert Walser, the last novel by Christa Wolf, and a new translation of Hermann Hesse’s Demian. As a Leon Levy fellow he worked on a biography of the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing, published by Crown in February 2017.

Adam Begley

Adam Begley, for many years the books editor of The New York Observer, is the author, with Ed Sorel, of Certitude: A Profusely Illustrated Guide to Blockheads and Bullheads, Past and Present; and with Laura Miller he edited The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors. In the 1990s he was a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine; Mirabella, where he wrote a monthly book column; and Lingua Franca, where he was a contributing editor. He is previously a Guggenheim Fellow, and as a Leon Levy fellow he worked the first biography of John Updike, the prolific and driven novelist, critic, story writer and poet who had but one cheer for literary biography. Updike was published by HarperCollins in 2014.

Madison Smartt Bell

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of some twenty books, including All Souls’ Rising, Devil’s Dream, Toussaint L’ouverture: A Biography, and (most recently) The Color of Night. He is a Professor of English at Goucher College and co-founder of Goucher’s undergraduate creative writing program. In 2008 he was a recipient of a Strauss Living from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As a Leon Levy fellow he worked on the first English-language biography of the Haitian revolutionary Jean Jacques Dessalines.

Elizabeth Kendall

Elizabeth Kendall is the author of two cultural histories, Where She Danced, the Birth of American Art Dance, and The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s; and two memoirs, American Daughter and Autobiography of a Wardrobe. She is a professor at The New School’s Eugene Lang College and its Liberal Studies Program, and a contributing editor for Dance Magazine. As a Leon Levy fellow she worked on a dual biography of George Balanchine and the ballerina Lidiia Ivanova, Balanchine and the Lost Muse, published by Oxford in 2013.

D.T. Max

D.T. Max is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His previous book, The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, was a scientific and cultural study of prion diseases, published in 2006. As a Leon Levy fellow he completed the first biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, published by Viking in 2012, a New York Times bestseller named by several critics as one of the best books of the year.

Michael Massing

Michael Massing is the author of The Fix, a critical study of the US war on drugs, and Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, and a co-founder of the Committee to Protect Journalists. In 1992, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. While at the Leon Levy Center, he worked on his biography of Luther and Erasmus, to be published by HarperCollins.

Jed Perl

Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic and the author of a number of books, including New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century, Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World, and Eyewitness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis. He is a visiting professor in the Liberal Studies Program at The New School and is currently working on the first full-length biography of Alexander Calder, to be published by Knopf.

Claudia Roth Pierpont

Claudia Roth Pierpont is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she has written some three dozen essays ranging in subject from Nietzsche to Mae West to contemporary Arabic fiction. A collection of her essays on women writers, Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. At the Leon Levy Center, she worked on a cultural history of twentieth-century New York in the form of juxtaposed biographies, considering six individuals and four partnerships – including Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art, George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein at New York City Ballet, and W. H. Auden – whose overlapping ideals, both moral and aesthetic, helped to make the city the cultural center of the world.

Mitchell Cohen

Mitchell Cohen is professor of political science at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. He was co-editor of Dissent Magazine from 1991-2009 and serves now on its editorial board and that of Jewish Social Studies. While at the Leon Levy Center he worked on writing a political biography of Richard Wagner, especially examining the controversial composer in his times and the roles of anarchism, nationalism and anti-Semitism in his operas. Professor Cohen’s past books include The Wager of Lucien Goldmann, Zion and State, and, as co-editor, Princeton Readings in Political Thought. His articles have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, Common Knowledge, and Musik und Asthetik.

Mary Lisa Gavenas

Mary Lisa Gavenas was a columnist at ELLE and served as senior editor at Glamour, In Style, and Mirabella; she writes for the academic and popular press. Following publication of Color Stories: Behind the Scenes in America’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry, she became a consultant on the beauty industry. As a Leon Levy fellow she worked on a biography of Mary Kay Ash, which had its genesis in the Mary Kay Ash entry she wrote for the American National Biography encyclopedia published by Oxford University Press.

Wendy Lesser

Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review and is the author of eight books, including one novel, The Pagoda in the Garden, and seven works of nonfiction, the most recent of which is Room for Doubt. Besides writing for Threepenny about dance, music, theater, and other cultural subjects, she occasionally reviews books for Bookforum, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. She has received fellowships and awards from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the American Academy in Berlin, the Dedalus Foundation, and many other institutions and organizations. As a Leon Levy fellow she worked on Music for Silenced Voices, a biography of Dmitri Shostakovich focusing on his 15 string quartets, published by Yale in 2011.

Website: The Lesser Blog

Vanda Krefft

Vanda Krefft’s articles on the entertainment industry and social issues have been published in magazines and newspapers, including ELLE, Redbook, Woman’s Day, and the Los Angeles Times. She is currently at work on her first book, a biography of Twentieth Century Fox founder William Fox, to be published by HarperCollins. Krefft has received a Helm Fellowship from Indiana University’s Lilly Library and a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. Her project explores the life and times of the forgotten movie mogul whose contributions to the art, technology, and business of film laid the foundation for today’s global popular culture.

John Matteson

John Matteson is Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. His scholarship in 19th-century American literature includes articles published in Leviathan, Streams of William James, and The New England Quarterly. His first book, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. During his residency, Matteson worked on The Lives of Margaret Fuller, which was published by Norton in 2012, and received the Ann M. Sperber Biography Award.

Thulani Davis

Thulani Davis is a journalist, playwright, and author of several books. Her most recent book, My Confederate Kinfolk, explores her black and white ancestors’ lives around the time of the Civil War. Her other works include two novels, 1959 and Maker of Saints, several plays and the scripts for the films Paid in Full and Maker of Saints. She has also written several award-winning PBS documentaries. She is a past recipient of a Lila Acheson Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers Award, a PEW Foundation National Theatre Artist Residency, and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship. She is a Grammy winner and is a 2007-2008 NYU Gallatin Newington-Cropsey Foundation Fellow. Davis was educated at Barnard College, Columbia University, and New York University and taught at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Thulani Davis has begun a biography of four blues queens: Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter and Bessie Smith.

Website: Thulani Davis

Mary Anne Weaver

Mary Anne Weaver, author of Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan and A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey Through the World of Militant Islam, was at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2007. She was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2004-2005. A longtime foreign correspondent for The New Yorker magazine, she has also published in The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine. A specialist in South Asian and Middle Eastern affairs, and political and militant Islam, she has reported from some thirty countries over the last twenty-five years, based in New Delhi, Cairo, Athens, and Bangkok. The Strange Journey of Ziad Jarrah: The Story of a Terrorist is the biography on the most improbable of the September 11th pilots. It gleans lessons on the way in which the profile of a terrorist has changed.

Molly Peacock

Molly Peacock has published six volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush and Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems, and a memoir, Paradise Piece by Piece, and is the writer/actor of a one-woman show in poems, “The Shimmering Verge.” Her poems are widely anthologized, appearing in The Best of the Best American Poetry and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She edited The Private I: Privacy in a Public World, and her essay about Mary Granville Delany, “Passion Flowers in Winter,” appears in The Best American Essays 2007. She teaches in the M.F.A. program in Writing at Spalding University. As a Leon Levy fellow, Peacock worked on an impressionistic biography of the late-life artistic coming-of-age of Mrs. Mary Granville Delany, the 18th-century cut-paper botanical artist, published by Bloomsbury in 2010 as The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72.

Website: Molly Peacock

James Davis

James Davis is an Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY, where he also teaches in the American Studies program. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University. His publications include essays on Henry James and Ida B. Wells and a book about the intersection of race and emergent U.S. consumer culture entitled Commerce in Color (University of Michigan Press, 2007). He is on the executive board of the Brooklyn College Center for Teaching and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Teacher. As a Leon Levy fellow he worked on a meditation on the life and work of Eric Walrond, a fiction writer and journalist born in Guyana and raised in Barbados and Panama, who rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance before moving to England. His book Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean was published by Columbia University Press in 2015.

Website: James Davis