Hilton Als

Hilton Als is a writer and theater critic who won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. He began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, became a staff writer there in 1994, and its theater critic in 2002. Earlier, he was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. His first book, The Women, was published in 1996. His most recent book, White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award in 2014, discusses various narratives of race and gender. In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim for creative writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03. In 2016, he received Lambda Literary’s Trustee Award for Excellence in Literature. In 2018 he received the Langston Hughes Medal from City College of New York. Als is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College.