Duplan '14 Receives Whiting Award
Faculty member Anaïs Duplan '14 is a recipient of the 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction.
Duplan was honored with this prestigious award in April for his book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020). His other publications include I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), a book of essays, a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017).
According to the 2022 Whiting Award judges, Duplan's work “devotes itself to the work of others and reveals a writer attuned to the infinite possibilities of human art and identity."
The Whiting Awards, established by the Whiting Foundation in 1985 and celebrating their 37th anniversary, remain one of the most esteemed and largest monetary gifts ($50,000) to emerging writers. They are given to recognize early-career achievement and empower recipients to fulfill the promise of exceptional literary work to come. A total of $9 million has been awarded to 370
fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, and playwrights to date.
“As the world opens up, these brilliant writers open up our world,” said Courtney Hodell, Director of Literary Programs. “From fresh cultural criticism, to poems of place and personhood and appetite, to fiction that brings surreal wit to compassionate portraits, their work is the spring thaw of the mind.”
The awards ceremony in April included a keynote by MacArthur Fellow and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Maggie Nelson, followed by a reading by the 2022 Whiting Award winners.