CalArts Names Professor Hilton Als 2022 Katie Jacobson Writer-in-Residence

Associate Professor Hilton Als was recently named the 2022 Katie Jacobson Writer-in-Residence by California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

Established in 2013, the Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence Program is organized by the MFA Creative Writing Program at CalArts and brings one prestigious writer to campus for a public reading and classroom visit. Previously selected writers include Roxane Gay, Joy Harjo, and George Saunders.

On February 24, CalArts' Creative Writing Program Director Brian Evenson hosted a public interview event with Als and welcomed him to campus. The next day, Als gave a public reading of his new and previous works at REDCAT, CalArts' multidisciplinary center for contemporary arts.

Evenson stated, “We’re delighted to have Hilton Als as this year’s Katie Jacobson Writer-in-Residence. Als is one of our most versatile and nimble contemporary non-fiction writers and his writings stretch from memoir to theater criticism to art criticism, touching on all points in between. His work is dynamic and surprising, breaking boundaries and rules in the best and most startling of ways.”

Recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, Hilton Als became a staff writer at The New Yorker in October 1994, and a theatre critic in 2002. He began contributing to the magazine in 1989, writing pieces for “The Talk of the Town.” Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. He has also written articles for The Nation and collaborated on film scripts for Swoon and Looking for Langston. Als edited the catalog for the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition entitled Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, which ran from November 1994 to March 1995. His first book, The Women, a meditation on gender, race, and personal identity, was published in 1996. His most recent book, White Girls, discusses various narratives around 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 2009, Als worked with the performer Justin Bond on Cold Water, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and videos by performers, at La MaMa Gallery. In 2010, he co-curated Self-Consciousness at the Veneklasen Werner Gallery in Berlin, and published Justin Bond/Jackie Curtis, his second book.