Former Leon Levy Center Fellow Eric K. Washington’s Boss of the Grips: the Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal (Liveright, 2019) has won the Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York history. Congratulations, Eric!

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.

Channing Joseph was awarded a prestigious Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for his in-progress biography, House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens.

The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant of $40,000 is awarded to writers in the process of completing a book of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction.

House of Swann is the story of William Dorsey Swann, an African-American man born into slavery who became the world’s first self-described “drag queen” and the leader of possibly the world’s earliest-known gay liberation organization. In the 1880s and ’90s, Swann inspired a rebellious group of black butlers, coachmen, and cooks — most of them former slaves as well — to create a secret world of balls in Washington, D.C., risking their lives and livelihoods before there were any legal or political organizations willing to come to their defense, and nearly a century before the Stonewall Riots. House of Swann will be published by Crown.

On April 22, 2019, Executive Director Kai Bird announced the award of five resident fellowships, including the first Leon Levy/Alfred P. Sloan fellow for a biography on a figure from science for 2019-2020. Each resident fellow receives a $72,000 grant, research assistance, writing space and full access to research facilities.