2019 Grant Recipients

Patricia Albers

Patricia Albers is the author of Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life, the first biography of the abstract painter, and Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti. She is currently completing a biography of the Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész. Albers lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Jennifer Croft

Jennifer Croft won the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa.

Danielle Dreilinger

Danielle Dreilinger is a North Carolina storytelling reporter for Gannett/USA Today Network and the author of the critically acclaimed book The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live,published in May 2021 by W. W. Norton.

Paul Elie

Paul Elie is a senior fellow in Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He is the author of two books, The Life You Save May Be Your Own(2003) and Reinventing Bach (2012), both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. A third book, Controversy, is forthcoming. He lives in Brooklyn.

Lauren Elkin

Lauren Elkin is the author of No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus(Semiotext(e)) and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City (FSG), a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the Art of the Essay. She lives in London.

McKenzie Funk

PEN Literary Award winner McKenzie Funk, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and other publications, is writing a book for St. Martin’s Press about the history of data.

Santi Elijah Holley

Santi Elijah Holley is a journalist and author of the 2020 book Murder Ballads, a literary history of the English and American folk ballad tradition. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson has spent most of his adult life in China, writing about civil society, religion, and politics. A Pulitzer Prize-winner for his coverage of the country, he has written three previous books. He received a grant for his fourth book on counter-historians striving to challenge the Communist Party’s monopoly on the past.

Emily Kopley

Emily Kopley is the author of Virginia Woolf and Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2021) and has published in the TLS, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal, where she teaches at McGill University.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee

Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and others. She is one of the few journalists allowed to travel to North Korea since the Korean War. Her novel, The Evening Hero, was published in 2022; and Hurt You, a non-neurotypical retelling of Of Mice and Men, was published in 2023. She teaches fiction at Columbia where she is Writer in Residence and core faculty at The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.

Julie Mayhew

Julie Mayhew is a journalist turned actress turned writer of fiction and drama. She is the author of four Carnegie-nominated novels for young adults, and two literary thrillers for adult audiences, Impossible Causes and Little Nothings, both published by Bloomsbury. Her Silvers supported book The One And Only Mabel Poulton will mark her non-fiction debut.

Ève Morisi

Ève Morisi is Associate Professor of French at the University of Oxford. Her research examines the interface of poetics, politics and ethics in French, Francophone, and comparative literature from the 19th to the 21st century. Several of her books have focused on Albert Camus and on literary representations of extreme violence at critical historical junctures.

Alexis Okeowo

Alexis Okeowo is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a contributing editor at Vogue, and the author of “A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa,” which received the 2018 PEN Open Book Award. In 2020, they were named journalist of the year by the Newswomen’s Club of New York.

Efthimios Parasids

Efthimios Parasidis is a bioethicist and Professor of Law and Public Health at Ohio State University. He is writing a book that examines ethical, legal, and societal issues surrounding biomedical innovations and the quest for military superiority.

Amy Reading

Amy Reading is the author of The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Short History of the Big Con.She is writing a biography of Katharine S. White, first fiction editor of The New Yorker. She holds a PhD in American studies from Yale University.

Aaron Robertson

Aaron Robertson is a writer, translator, and editor at Spiegel & Grau. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and elsewhere. His first book, The Black Utopians, will be published by FSG in 2023.

Elaine Showalter

Elaine Showalter is Professor Emerita of English and Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. She is the author of ten books, including A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977). Her most recent book is The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe (2016).

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is the author of Personal Stereo, a cultural history of the Walkman. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. She is working on a book about nuclear power and the future of environmentalism.

Francesca Wade

Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She was a 2020-21 Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and is working on a book about the afterlife of Gertrude Stein.