Photo credit: Marion Ettlinger
Brenda Wineapple, the Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, is among the finalists recently announced for the National Book Critics Circle prizes.
Wineapple is a nominee in the biography category for “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.”
Other finalists in the category include Annette Gordon-Reed’s “The Hemingses of Monticello,” winner of the National Book Award last fall; Patrick French’s “The World is What It Is,” an authorized biography of Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul; Paula J. Giddings’s “Ida, A Sword Among Lions”; and Steve Coll’s “The Bin Ladens.”
Winners will be announced March 12.
Wineapple joined Union in 1976. Her books include “Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner;” “Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein”; and most recently, “Hawthorne: A Life,” which received the Ambassador Award of the English-speaking Union for the best biography of 2003 and the Julia Ward Howe Prize from the Boston Book Club.
Wineapple’s essays, articles and reviews have appeared regularly in national publications such as The American Scholar, New York Times Book Review and The Nation. She has served as chair of the nonfiction panel of the National Book Awards.
Wineapple has been a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and twice a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.
Wineapple will teach a junior seminar on Dickinson and a course on Modern Poetry during the spring term.
The book critics circle is a nonprofit organization with more than 900 members.
For a complete list of nominees, click here.