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Anaïs Duplan, a member of Sarah Lawrence’s MFA Writing faculty since 2020, is the winner of a 2022 Whiting Award in nonfiction, as announced in a ceremony hosted by the Whiting Foundation on April 6. The prestigious prize recognizes emerging writers’ early-career achievements and seeks to empower recipients to fulfill the promise of exceptional literary work to come.
A trans* poet, curator, and artist, Anaïs Duplan is the author of I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021), a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). In addition to Sarah Lawrence, he has taught poetry at The New School, Bennington College, and Columbia University, amongst others. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017- 2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2021 received a Marian Goodman fellowship from Independent Curators International for his research on Black experimental documentary. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He was the 2021 recipient of the QUEER|ART|PRIZE for Recent Work.
The Whiting Foundation has a long history of supporting writers, establishing the Whiting Award in 1985 and awarding the $50,000 prize annually to 10 emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan