Fellowships : Past Biography Fellows
2010-2011 Biography Fellows
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 be 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 will be working 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 Center he will be 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.
2009-2010 Biography Fellows
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. Gavenas' biography of Mary Kay Ash had its genesis
in her writing the Mary Kay Ash entry for the American National Biography 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.
Her current project is a biography of Dmitri Shostakovich that focuses on his 15 string
quartets.
On the Web
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 an Associate 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 will continue his work on The Lives of Margaret Fuller.
On the Web
Website: John Matteson »
2008-2009 Biography Fellows
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.
On the Web
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.
Molly Peacock's project, Passion Flowers in Winter: A Woman Begins Her Life's Work at the Age of 73, is an impressionistic biography examining the late-life artistic coming-of-age of Mrs. Mary Granville Delany, the 18th-century cut-paper botanical artist.
On the Web
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.
He will continue work 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.
On the Web
Website: James Davis »