Catherine Lacey ’10 and Adjunct Professor Brenda Wineapple Named Cullman Center Fellows

Adjunct Assistant Professor Catherine Lacey ’10 and Adjunct Professor Brenda Wineapple have been named 2023 Fellows of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

The 2023-2024 year marks the 25th class of Fellows for the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. This year’s group is composed of fifteen people selected from the fields of academics, literature, translation, and visual art. An international program, the Cullman Fellowship is granted to people whose work will most benefit from direct access to the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, NYPL’s flagship location and home to some of its most impressive collections.

This year’s Fellows were selected from a pool of 408 applicants from 51 countries. Lacy is one of three fiction writers selected, and Wineapple one of four nonfiction writers.

“Our Fellows are selected on the basis of excellence and a strong need for the Library’s resources,” said Martha Hodes, interim director of the Cullman Center. “This year’s judges have put together a diversely brilliant and creative cohort who will draw both widely and deeply on the Library’s many and varied holdings and collections.”

The Fellowship term will run from September 2023 through May 2024. Each Fellow will receive a stipend, a private office in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, access to the renowned collections and resources of the NYPL, and assistance from its curatorial and reference staff. The Fellowship also aims to build a spirit of collaboration and contribution, both within the Library and the city of New York, particularly by hosting Conversations from the Cullman Center, a public series of free programs that focus on the books Fellows worked on while in residence at the Library.

The list of past Fellows features Assistant Professor Rivka Galchen and Adjunct Professor Nicole Krauss, as well as other celebrated authors such as André Aciman, Elif Batuman, Jennifer Egan, Sally Rooney, Brandon Taylor, Colm Tóibín, Colson Whitehead, and Alejandro Zambra.

Catherine Lacey is the author of five works of fiction, most recently Biography of X. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages, and her accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and The New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. At the Cullman Center, she will be researching unpopular psychoanalytic theories from the mid-twentieth century and the Art Deco movement for a new novel.

Brenda Wineapple is the author of six books, most recently The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, named one of the ten best books of the year by New York Times critic Jennifer Szalai. An earlier book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her forthcoming book concerns the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial. Wineapple is the recipient of the Literature Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, an Ambassador Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. At the Cullman Center, she will be working on a biography of Fiorello La Guardia.