The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers has selected its 23rd class of Fellows for the 2021-2022 year. The class is made up of 15 talented academics, literary artists, and independent scholars. The Fellows were selected from a pool of 506 applicants from 48 countries. The class of 2021 includes: Rich Benjamin (Incoming Writing Fellow 2022) for his independent scholarship and Maaza Mengiste (Incoming Writing Fellow 2022) for her fiction writing.
RICH BENJAMIN
Talk to Me: A Family Memoir
Rich Benjamin’s analyses of culture and politics appear regularly in public debate, including in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books Daily, as well as on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, and PBS. He is the author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, which was selected for an Editor’s Choice award by the American Library Association. At the Cullman Center, Benjamin will be working on a family memoir that is also a portrait of America. The project combines archival research, oral history, political analysis, and lyricism.
MAAZA MENGISTE
A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths
The Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow
Maaza Mengiste is the author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize and a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, as well as a Los Angeles Times Books Prize finalist. It was named a best book of 2019 by the New York Times, NPR, Time, Elle, and other publications. Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, her debut, was selected by the Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books. At the Cullman Center, she will work on her third novel, A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths, set during the interwar years in Berlin. It focuses on the lives of Afro-German models who sat for some of Germany’s greatest painters and follows their lives as Nazism takes hold of Germany.
Congratulations to Rich Benjamin and Maaza Mengiste, as well as the rest of the Fellows selected. View the full list of recipients, and learn more about the program here.