Colson Whitehead

Celebrated author and former Hunter College faculty member Colson Whitehead has published eleven books since 2001 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice. Whitehead was born and raised in Manhattan, and after graduating from Harvard College started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music. At Hunter, Whitehead worked closely with MFA students as part of the Hertog Research Fellowship program. 

The Underground Railroad (2016) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, and was a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Whitehead adapted the book as a mini-series that premiered in 2021. His novels have also won the Kirkus Prize, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, a Young Lions Fiction Award,  the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award, and the PEN/Oakland Award.

His other novels are The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, Sag Harbor, Zone One, The Nickel Boys, Harlem Shuffle, and Crook Manifesto. The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky & Death is a nonfiction account of the 2011 World Series of Poker.

Whitehead’s reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York magazine, Harper’s, and Granta. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the Dos Passos Prize, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. In 2018, New York State named him a New York State Author, and in 2020 the Library of Congress awarded him its Prize for American Fiction.

In addition to Hunter College, he has taught at the University of Houston, Columbia University, Brooklyn College, New York University, Princeton University, Wesleyan University, and been a Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College, the University of Richmond, and the University of Wyoming.