Former Fellow Nicholas Boggs Wins Whiting Award
Former Fellow Nicholas Boggs was awarded a Whiting Award in Nonfiction for his biography of James Baldwin
Drawing on extensive archival material newly brought to light by the author, James Baldwin: A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, Black American painter Beauford Delaney; his lover and muse, Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and his collaborators, famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac. For the first time, this biography shows how Baldwin drew on complex structures within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, aesthetic, and erotic—and alchemized them into art that spoke truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and Black and queer literary history.