2020 Recipients
2020 Recipients
Thomas Bass is the author of seven books on subjects ranging from scientific expeditions in Africa to breaking the bankin Las Vegas with toe-operated computers. Two of his books were serialized in The New Yorker and two others have been optioned by Netflix. His Silvers Grant was used to research life in nuclear exclusion zones.
Justin Beal
Justin Beal is an artist with an extensive exhibition history in the United States and Europe. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum, Frieze, Art in America, and the Los Angeles Times and is included in the permanent collections of the Albright Knox Museum, the Hammer Museum, and MoCA, Los Angeles.Sandfuture is his first book.
Thomas Beller
Thomas Beller is the author of Seduction Theory: Stories, The Sleep-Over Artist: A Novel, How To Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood, and J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, which won the New York City Book Award for biography/memoir. His next book is Lost In The Game: A Book About Basketball. He is an associate professor and director of creative writing at Tulane University.
Rich Benjamin
Rich Benjamin is working on a family memoir, as a Fellow at the Dorothy Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He is the author of Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America (Editor’s Choice award, American Library Association). Benjamin’s work appears regularly in platforms including the New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR and CNN.
Joanna Biggs
Joanna Biggs is an editor at Harper’s Magazine. Her first book, All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, came out in 2015 and she is working on a collection of essays about women writers, including Sylvia Plath, Elena Ferrante and Toni Morrison.
Jeffrey Arlo Brown
Jeffrey Arlo Brown has been an editor at the classical music magazine VAN since 2015. His work has also appeared in Slate, The Baffler, Atlas Obscura, Narratively, TAZ am Wochenende, and other publications. He lives in Berlin.
Alexander Clapp
Alexander Clapp is a journalist based in Athens. His reporting on the Balkans has appeared in London Review of Books, New Left Review and The Baffler.
Daniel José Camacho
Daniel José Camacho is a columnist for The Revealer, published by the Center for Religion and Media at New York University, and is writing a book about Bartolomé de las Casas with Avid Reader Press. He has previously been a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian and an associate editor at Sojourners.
Susan Delson
Susan Delson is the author of Soundies and the Changing Imange of Black Americans on Screen: One Dime at a Time (Indiana University Press, 2021), for which she received a 2020 Silvers Foundation award. Previous books include Dudley Murphy, Hollywood Wild Card (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and (as editor) Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals (Prestel, 2011). Her writings on art and culture appear in the Wall Street Journal and other publications.
Carina del Valle Schorske
Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer and translator living between New York City and Puerto Rico. Her essays and criticism have been published in many venues including Bookforum, The Believer, The Common, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. Her debut essay collection, The Other Island, was honored with a Whiting Nonfiction Grant in 2020 and is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.
Robert W. Fieseler
Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist and the author of Tinderbox: The Untold Story Of The Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation — winner of the Edgar Award and the Louisiana Literary Award. He’s currently working on his second queer history book and lives with his husband in New Orleans.
Mya Frazier
Mya Frazier is a writer based in the Midwest who reports on poverty and inequality. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, Guardian Long Read, Outside, Harper’s, NewYorker.com, and Columbia Journalism Review. She was previously a business journalist at The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) and American City Business Journals.
Jennifer Kabat
Jennifer Kabat’s essays have been included in Best American Essays, Granta, Frieze, BOMB, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review and the White Review. She’s received a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism and teaches at the New School and SVA. Currently working on a memoir on time and socialist uprisings, she lives in upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.
Diana Kim
Diana Kim teaches at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. She is the author of Empires of Vice: The Rise of Opium Prohibition Across Southeast Asia, which won the Giovanni Sartori Book Award in 2021.
Oliver Roeder
Oliver Roeder has been a senior writer at FiveThirtyEight and editor of The Riddler, a collection of the site’s math puzzles. He studied artificial intelligence as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and holds a PhD in economics focused on game theory. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Sarah Watling
Sarah Watling is the author of The Olivier Sisters: A Biography. She was the 2016 winner of the Tony Lothian Prize and her writing has appeared in The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplementand Vogue, among other places. Her next book, about the Spanish Civil War, is forthcoming from Jonathan Cape and Knopf.
Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno is the author of several books, most recently a study of Hervé Guibert, To Write As If Already Dead (Columbia University Press) and Drifts(Riverhead.) She is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and also teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.