The Whiting Foundation revealed the winners of its $40,000 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grants, given annually to “writers in the process of completing a book of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction.”
Heather Ann Thompson, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, was given a grant for her planned book Fear and Fury: Bernhard Goetz and the Rebirth of White Vigilantism in America, about the infamous 1984 subway shooting in New York, in which a white man shot four Black teenagers,and was later acquitted of attempted murder and assault charges.
Leah Broad, the author of Quartet: How Four Women Challenged the Musical World, received a grant for This Woman’s War: Women and Music in World War II, while James Duesterberg was named a receipient for Final Fantasy: A Secret History of the Present.
Arun Kundnani received a grant for I Rise in Fire: H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, and the Long Revolution, as did Sarah Esther Maslin for Nothing Stays Buried: Trauma, Truth, and One Town’s Fight for Justice in the Aftermath of a Massacre; Hettie O’Brien for Diminishing Returns; and Emily Ogden for Frailties: How Poe Helps Us Live With Ourselves.
Other authors receiving grants were Nadim Roberts for The Highway; Ronald Williams II for Black Embassy: TransAfrica and the Struggle for Foreign Policy Justice; and Hannah Zeavin for All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance.
The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grants were established in 2016. Previous grantees include Rachel Aviv (Strangers to Ourselves), Sarah M. Broom (The Yellow House), and Patricia Evangelista (Some People Need Killing).
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
