Photo credit: Marion Ettlinger
Brenda Wineapple, the Doris Zemurray Stone and Washington Irving Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, is one of two winners of the third annual National Award for Arts Writing.
Sponsored by the Arts Club of Washington, the award recognizes an outstanding nonfiction book about the arts.
Wineapple was honored for “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). Beginning in 1862, the poet and the Boston minister/essayist/abolitionist corresponded through letters for a quarter of a century.
Wineapple shares honors with Baltimore Sun film critic Michael Sragow, who wrote “Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master” (Pantheon Books, 2008). The two will take part in an awards dinner and public readings in Washington, D.C., in May.
“The idea of the passionate but chaste Emily Dickinson on a blind date with Byronic, swashbuckling Victor Fleming, if only for one night, encompasses precisely the breadth of inspiration that these awards exist to honor,” said noted book and film critic David Kipen, one of three judges for the prestigious award.
The others were National Book Award winner and former Poet Laureate of Maryland Linda Pastan, and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Reynolds Price.
Earlier this year, Wineapple was named a National Book Critics Circle finalist in biography for “White Heat.”
On the Union faculty since 1976, she also is the author of “Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner," “Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein" and “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 is teaching a junior seminar on Dickinson and a course on modern poetry this term.