The 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant

The 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant Wil S. Hylton Channing Gerard Joseph Jim Morris Kristen Radtke Albert Samaha Damon Tabor Walter Thompson-Hernรกndez Ilyon Woo

The Whiting Foundation recognizes that works of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction are essential to our culture, but come into being at great cost to writers in time and resources.

The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant of $40,000 is awarded to writers in the process of completing a work of nonfiction to the highest aesthetic and intellectual level.

It is intended to encourage original and ambitious projects by giving its grantees the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition.

The The Recipients Recipients of the 2019 2019 Whiting Whiting Creative Creative Nonfiction Nonfiction Grant Grant

Wil S. Hylton

The Call of Empire

The Midnight Rescue of Evangelina Cosío and the Rise of the American Century Forthcoming from Riverhead Books History/Biography

The project:

Judges’ citation:

The Call of Empire is the first complete account of a formative event in American history. In the fall of 1897, a band of US diplomats and journalists conspired to help a young leader of the Cuban independence movement escape from a Spanish prison, smuggling her to the United States to rally the public for war with Spain. Based on thousands of previously undiscovered documents, it reveals the key figures in a conspiracy that galvanized public support for the war that made the United States a global power.

Rigorous and exciting: an engrossing project of biographical recovery. The stories of women as leaders are often left out of official accounts of history, and this is an important attempt to place Evangelina Cosío in a larger historical context at a turning point in American history when the country chose to assume a role as a superpower. The layers of inquiry — of Evangelina herself; Cuban history; press barons and crusading media; and the rise of interventionist foreign policy — complement each other, and build to a novel and groundbreaking project. The research is exhaustive: the author scoured flea markets obtaining various conflicting nineteenth-century accounts of her jailbreak, made twelve trips to different archives, and tracked down her last remaining descendant in a building without power in rural Cuba.

Truly impressive.

Wil S. Hylton is a journalist and historian. His first book, Vanished, examined the unresolved grief in families of missing soldiers, and his articles and essays have been featured on the covers of The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine. He has been writing about Cuba and Latin American affairs for more than twenty years.

“On a windy morning in 1897, a young woman stepped off a tugboat in Manhattan and captivated the world. She was slight and lithe, just twenty years old, with long dark curls and ivory skin and the hint of a bemused smile. Six days earlier, she had been a prisoner of the Spanish government in colonial Cuba. She had been confined for more than a year at the dingy women’s prison of southern Havana, where she stood accused of kidnapping, attempted murder, and treason. Within three days, she would become the most celebrated figure in New York. She would occupy a lavish suite at the Waldorf hotel, host an elaborate banquet in the ballroom of Delmonico’s, and be feted by a crowd of cheering fans that the New York Times estimated at 75,000 people, who lined the sidewalks of Madison Avenue for a boisterous parade in her honor while fireworks exploded above a stage to welcome her at Madison Square Park and newsboys fanned across the city to shout her name — Evangelina! — from banner headlines that echoed around the globe.

The city in which Evangelina Cosío landed was a tangle of contradictions. It rippled with the excess of the Gilded Age in all its balustraded opulence, even as the nation struggled to recover from a crippling economic recession. A collapse of the stock market four years earlier had left five hundred banks insolvent, shuttered fifteen thousand businesses, and sent unemployment to twenty percent, while electric streetcars raced up Broadway, horseless carriages wheeled around corners, and a medley of marvels like the telephone, telegraph, and motion picture seemed to reach through time and space, stitching the fractured country together after a century of conquest and civil war.

Even in this churning landscape, Evangelina commanded singular attention. The owner of the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer, published a series of six illustrations to depict her journey at sea, while his rival William Randolph Hearst plastered a ten-inch portrait of her face on the cover of the New York Journal, followed by a diorama of her stepping ashore with the headline “Can It Be A Dream?” For months to come, Evangelina would preoccupy the American public. She traveled from city to city, rallying crowds to support the revolution in Cuba. The war unfolding in her country was unlike any in history. It was a popular rebellion by a mixed-race coalition of men and women across economic lines, who promised to establish the most progressive government on earth.

At a time when the Supreme Court of the United States had just enshrined a doctrine of “separate but equal,” when vigilante mobs of white supremacists routinely terrorized black communities in the South, when the American campaign for women’s rights was still decades from attaining suffrage, the rebels in Cuba were fighting on a platform to eradicate racial discrimination, guarantee gender equity, and replace a system of colonial oligarchy with universal inclusion. It was a movement whose intellectual leader rejected the concept of race entirely. Its most exalted military commander was an AfroCuban general. Its officer corps included two dozen women at the rank of captain — and then there was Evangelina Cosío, its emissary to the world.

”

Channing Gerard Joseph

House of Swann

Where Slaves Became Queens Forthcoming from Crown Publishing History/Biography

The project:

Judges’ citation:

House of Swann is the story of William Dorsey Swann, an African-American man born into slavery who became the world’s first self-described “drag queen” and the leader of possibly the earliestknown gay liberation organization. In the 1880s and ’90s, Swann inspired a rebellious group of black butlers, coachmen, and cooks — most of them former slaves as well — to create a secret world of balls in Washington, D.C., risking their lives and livelihoods before there were any legal or political organizations willing to come to their defense, and nearly a century before the Stonewall Riots.

It is impossible not to be excited about Channing Gerard Joseph’s great feat of historical research: his discovery of William Dorsey Swann, a man born into slavery who went on to establish a culture of drag balls in post-Reconstructionist Washington not unlike those still thriving today, nearly 140 years later. This is crisp and evocative history that cuts across many different fields of inquiry in order to document a riveting story about the function and flourishing of beauty in marginalized communities. Joseph has a talent for accumulating witty, atmospheric details that together create an irresistibly immersive world. Through tireless archival work and in consultation with noted academics, Channing Gerard Joseph complicates and expands our understanding of the history of LGBTQ activism and African-American history.

Channing Gerard Joseph is an award-winning journalist whose career has taken him from the southern tip of Africa to the mountains of rural Japan. His articles have been published

by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, MTV News, and others. He was a fellow of the International Center for Journalists and has received support from the Ford Foundation, the Scripps Howard Foundation, and the Brooks and Joan Fortune Family Foundation. He is a 2019 winner of the Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship. He teaches journalism at the University of Southern California.

“When the police burst through the door of the two-story residence in northwest Washington, D.C., just half a mile from the White House, they discovered dozens of black men dancing together there, wearing silk and satin dresses made “according to the latest fashions” of 1888. Most of them were former slaves or the children of slaves.

As soon as the partygoers saw the officers, the dancing stopped. The attendees looked on in shock for a brief moment before scurrying to make their getaway. Many of them, the newspapers later reported, struggled to strip off their garments, their ribbons, and their “wigs of long, wavy hair.” Others raced immediately to the back doors or leapt out of second-floor windows and onto the roofs of nearby buildings. The sound of shattering glass awakened the neighbors as one unfortunate guest crashed through a skylight.

William Dorsey Swann, the self-proclaimed “queen” of the gathering, had no intention of running away. It was his thirtieth birthday celebration, and according to The Washington Post, he was “arrayed in a gorgeous dress of cream-colored satin.” Unlike the others, he ran frantically toward the officers in a vain attempt to keep them from entering the room. “The queen stood in an attitude of royal defiance,” The National Republican noted on its front page. Swann, “bursting with rage,” told the police, “‘You is no gentlemen.’”

A brawl ensued, and his “handsome” gown was torn to shreds. Half-naked, he was then taken to jail and charged with the so-called crime of “being a suspicious character.”

“It is safe to assert,” one commentator wrote after the raid, “that the number living as do those who were taken into custody last night must be exceedingly small.” The Post observed there was “considerable excitement on the streets and a crowd of about 400 people followed the prisoners to the station house.” Drag queens were more than a novelty in the 1880s. They were a shock to the system.

That night, Swann was arrested with 12 other African-American men, but according to one report, as many as 17 other men may have escaped. As was the custom, the local papers printed the names of those who were detained. Ironically, acts of public shaming like this one are the only reason we now know who Swann was. The identities and stories of the men who escaped capture have been lost to history.

The surprise raid of April 12, 1888, was neither the first nor the last time that William Dorsey Swann was carried away in the police wagon for organizing drag balls in private homes in the nation’s capital. But his decision to fight that night rather than to submit passively to his arrest marks one of the earliest-known instances of violent resistance in the name of gay rights.

”

Jim Morris

The Cancer Factory Forthcoming from Beacon Press Investigative Journalism/Public Health

The project:

Judges’ citation:

The Cancer Factory examines the weak protections afforded workers exposed to toxic substances in America, a regulatory breach that contributes to an estimated 95,000 deaths from occupational illness each year. The story centers on a small Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company chemical plant in Niagara Falls, New York, which has experienced one of the nation’s worst, and best-documented, outbreaks of work-related cancer.

Readers will be introduced to the lawyer who has represented bladder-cancer victims at the plant for more than thirty years, and retired workers who have been diagnosed with the disease and live in constant fear of its recurrence. They will learn about the ascent and decline of Niagara Falls as an industrial powerhouse that provided good jobs for decades but also left behind a legacy of sickness that shortened many lives.

An investigative tour de force, The Cancer Factory accomplishes an incredibly difficult feat: it shows how a major corporation has ignored and continues to ignore research by industry scientists about the dangers of chemical exposures, and draws connections between those exposures and their impact on particular workers’ health. This riveting, powerful project illuminates a much larger pattern in the American blue-collar workforce, and the argument at the core of this book — that factories have not adequately protected their workers — is a vital one, made with force. The book is based on four decades of reporting, the author’s archival knowledge of worker health regulations, and a comprehensive review of the scientific literature. His rigorous reporting and longstanding relationships with his subjects and their families will result in a definitive account of one of the worst outbreaks of workplace cancer since World War II.

Jim Morris has been a journalist since 1978, focusing on the environment, labor, and public health. He has won more than 80 awards for his work on topics such as the deceptive marketing of asbestos in developing nations; the fatal drugging of children by Medicaid dentists; and the resurgence of silicosis, a deadly lung disease, among miners and sandblasters. Morris worked for newspapers in Texas and California before coming to Washington, D.C., in 1999. He is in his twelfth year with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization, where he is executive editor.

“Around 4 o’clock in the afternoon on August 4, 1992, during a bathroom break from moving furniture, Rod Halford began urinating blood. Not a little blood; sheets of it. It was “such a startling effect,” he would later testify in a deposition, that “I jumped back and [the blood] went all over.” Halford, then living in Youngstown, New York, near Lake Ontario, had the presence of mind to hold his urine stream and ask his wife, Nellie, to bring him a jar so he could capture a sample. She grabbed the first thing she could find: a baby bottle. Halford called his family doctor, who told him to dump the bottle’s contents and report to Mount St. Mary’s Hospital in Lewiston, seven miles away, the next morning. There Halford gave another urine sample, but a proper analysis wasn’t possible; still too much blood. X-rays were taken two days later, and a urologist gave Halford the results three days after that: he had a tumor on his bladder the size of his pinky fingernail. The tumor was removed, without general anesthesia, on August 10; Halford had vetoed the idea of being put under and staying overnight in the hospital because, he explained in his deposition, Nellie couldn’t drive his pickup truck, which had a stick shift, and “I just don’t relish hospitals anyway.” There was, Halford admitted, some discomfort associated with the procedure.

When he saw the blood in the toilet, “I had an inkling of what it was,” Halford told me. At the time of his diagnosis, he was the 18th current or former Goodyear employee in Niagara Falls to develop bladder cancer. Halford had started at the plant as a chemical operator in 1956, become an electrician in 1970 and retired as a janitor at 55 in 1991. His tumor was, to some extent, foreseeable: by 1981, when he was president of Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Local 8-277, he knew of four co-workers with the disease. By 1988 he knew of eight. Federal health investigators, invited into the plant by the union, delivered even more alarming news after they had completed a study: there were 15 confirmed cases of bladder cancer, nearly four times what would be expected in the general population.

From 1957 onward, Halford and his colleagues had inhaled — and, more important, absorbed — a chemical called ortho-toluidine, known within Goodyear as Dominic.

Halford would come home from work stinking of it. It made his wife gag when she washed his clothes. It seeped through his pores while he slept, leaving a brown stain on the sheets. The chemical was used to make an anti-cracking agent for tires. Internal documents show its primary manufacturer, E.I. DuPont De Nemours and Company (now part of Dow-DuPont Incorporated), knew by the mid-1950s that the smelly, yellowish liquid caused bladder cancer in laboratory animals and was protecting its own production workers in New Jersey against exposure. But DuPont either didn’t adequately warn its customer, Goodyear, about the risks, or Goodyear didn’t listen. Maybe both companies were at fault; that discussion is still playing out in the courts.

At this writing the unofficial tally of bladder cancers from Goodyear stands at 71, though that might be an undercount given the challenges of tracking retirees. Some of the victims are dead. Others live with the anxiety of knowing their malignancies, contained by surgery and chemotherapy, could resurface at any time.

”

Kristen Radtke

Seek You

Essays on American Loneliness Forthcoming from Pantheon Books Graphic Essays

The project:

Judges’ citation:

Seek You: Essays on American Loneliness explores the crisis of loneliness through text and image, examining isolation through the lenses of gender, violence, media, technology, science, and art.

An innovative, lyric exploration of loneliness, Seek You sets word and image in dialogue with each other in organic, unforced, and often poignant ways. It is thrilling in its form, its investigations, and its humanity. This is not a memoir, but a reported-out inquiry; the author is consulting the right body of emergent empirical research, as well as deftly relying on her superb personal judgment and interpretive power. We see the chorus of judgmental social media voices crowding the page; a dissection of the laugh track phenomenon; the opening image of a lonely body floating through space. It brings the graphic form into exciting new territory, and has the potential to spark a larger cultural conversation about modern isolation and its consequences.

Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This, and the forthcoming books Seek You: Essays on American Loneliness and Terrible Men, a graphic novel, all from Pantheon. She is the art director and deputy publisher of The Believer magazine, published at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. Her writing and illustrations have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, The Guardian, GQ, The New Yorker’s “Page Turner” and “Daily Shouts,” Oxford American, and many other places.

Albert Samaha

Concepcion

A Family’s Journey on the Immigrant Wave That Changed the Face of America Forthcoming from Riverhead Books Cultural Reportage/Memoir

The project:

Judges’ citation:

A story about a family’s immigrant optimism crashing into reality, Concepcion reveals the American mythologies that lured people from countries damaged by US foreign policies and the nation’s ongoing internal fight between the principles of inclusion and white supremacy.

The simple question about the immigrant experience at the heart of this project feels essential: Was it worth it to come here? Samaha approaches the subject as an investigator, deftly situating his riveting family history in the context of global currents of immigration over the past half-century, analyzing the lure of American culture and the reality of American life. His treatment is rigorous and unsentimental, refusing easy answers; in a moment when immigration dominates the headlines, this is a refreshingly honest and apolitical take. With its clever backand-forth structure, insightful analysis, and superb character development, Concepcion weaves history, statistics, and personal narrative in prose that is taut and witty and charged with life. It is a remarkable synthesis: a memoir that feels expansive and outward-looking.

Albert Samaha is an investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News and author of Never Ran, Never Will, which was a finalist for the PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award and winner of the New York Society Library’s Hornblower Award. His 2015 story on a narcotics unit led to its captain’s resignation, his story on a wrongful conviction freed a man from prison in 2017, and his 2018 story on a teenager assaulted by two detectives led six states to strengthen police sexual misconduct laws. His story on why Filipinos elected Rodrigo Duterte was selected into The Best American Travel Writing 2018.

“Three decades on the job, Uncle Spanky is the supervisor on his crew of baggage handlers at San Francisco International Airport. The younger guys he works with didn’t believe him when he told them his age. Still strong and slim, with a ponytail under his cowboy hat, thick mustache under his wraparound sunglasses, Spanky lifts and loads, lifts and loads the overstuffed suitcases, the boxes of fruit, the jangling golf bags, smooth and brisk, knowing just how to grab, just where to hold, to avoid fumbling, to minimize strain. He couldn’t respect the supervisors who didn’t haul alongside their crew. His back might lock up once in a while, but his spirit is spry, the quips coming fast and corny, the joy shining bright as ever when he greets you. The most accurate way I can describe my Uncle Spanky is that he carries himself the same way he eats — savoring, patient, purposeful, his plate piled the highest, the last to leave the table.

Though it had not always been the case, Spanky came to take great pride in his job — his personal, back-breaking role in helping make the world feel smaller. He thinks about the names on the luggage tags, the people floating in that limbo between leaving and arriving. Three decades ago, his own flight had rolled to a stop on the tarmac where he now spends his days. He’d lifted his own suitcase from the conveyer belt on which he now drops the bags of others. All these years later, Spanky was still at the airport.

Only occasionally does he think about the paths not taken, the imaginary visions that flash to the front of his mind, tempting him with regret. Every immigrant leaves behind an old life. Before he was a baggage handler, before he crossed the ocean, my Uncle Spanky was a motherfuckin’ rockstar.

The band was called VST & Company. The “S” stood for Spanky, who wrote and produced songs and played guitar; the “V” and “T” for Vic and Tito, the lead singers.

Alongside the half-dozen or so men who made up the “& Company” — a conglomerate of drummers, guitarists, keyboarders, and backup vocalists — Spanky, Vic, and Tito rose to stardom in the 1970s, their shiny, sleeveless, sequined vests sparking under the disco balls of sold out shows. They toured the country. Adoring mobs pursued them into restaurants and hotel lobbies. Bar owners covered their tabs and kept the beers flowing long past closing time. They were as big as it gets in the Philippines, A-List celebrities who’d earned themselves a rarefied path to the country’s upper-crust comforts.

With a style that blended high-octane disco with traditional Filipino love songs, VST was part of a cultural renaissance that coalesced in those years as medicine for the anxieties of Martial Law. The relentlessly upbeat music, dubbed “Manila Sound,” washed the country in escapist pleasure, fueling sweaty house parties that pushed on until the curfew lifted at dawn and revelers could stumble home without getting jailed or shot. It was music that sizzled with optimism and innocence — hearts won and kisses promised, caring arms and grooving bodies, fantasies unveiled as reality. The title of the band’s debut single, “Awitin Mo at Isasayaw Ko,” which immediately went gold, seemed to embody the band’s mission statement: “Sing your song and I will dance.” Spanky would always say that his favorite part of being a rock star was that moment on stage when he made eye contact with someone in the crowd who was just lost in the melody, swinging to the beat, euphoric, far away from whatever existed in the silence beyond.

”

Damon Tabor

The Mountain in the Burning Sky Forthcoming from Penguin Random House History/Biography

The project:

Judges’ citation:

The Mountain in the Burning Sky chronicles the early pioneering history of smokejumpers — elite aerial wilderness firefighters — and their later involvement in covert CIA missions throughout the Cold War. Recruited largely from rural Montana, a small band of farmhands, rodeo cowboys, and woodsmen went on to play crucial roles in the United States’ most significant clandestine operations around the world — including China, Tibet, India, the Congo, Cuba, Vietnam, and especially the CIA’s fifteen-year so-called “Secret War” in Laos.

This is the tale of the bizarre life and mysterious death of a smokejumper, chess champion, and bull rider turned CIA case officer who later stood against America’s abandonment of its local allies in Laos and Vietnam. Tabor has found a compelling and unusual American hero, rendering his swashbuckling arc with all the intensity of an epic cinematic yarn. He has performed dogged, difficult research, unearthing new information through human sourcing, archives, and government records. Alive to the grain and nuance of human experience, Tabor brings a modern sensibility and measured critique to a chapter of U.S. history that raises questions about the ruthless pragmatism that can drive American foreign policy.

This book is well positioned to expand our understanding of the history of the CIA and the conduct of the Cold War.

Damon Tabor’s work has focused on conflict, drug trafficking, black markets, and the environment. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Outside, Wired, and Men’s Journal. His writing has been noted in Best American Travel Writing and his Rolling Stone article “Border of Madness” was the basis of the Academy Award-nominated 2015 documentary Cartel Land. Most recently, he produced The Trade, a five-part documentary about the heroin epidemic which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and aired on Showtime.

“In life, the dead man had been a towering figure; in many circles, a legend. His name was Jerrold “Jerry” Daniels, though to many he was simply known as “Hog.” He had been an avid hunter and a woodsman, a rodeo cowboy and a Forest Service smokejumper, the elite airborne firefighters who parachute into wilderness fires. He was uncommonly handsome — blue-eyed, prow-chinned — and irreverently funny, though often artless with women. Around Missoula, he was known as a crackerjack chess player. At age 17, using a doctored driver’s license, he had joined the smokejumpers, a year younger than the statutory minimum but thereby securing his place as the youngest smokejumper in agency history. The profession offered peril — winds swing wildly, wildfires bloom — but also a paycheck and poetry. Strung from parachutes, jumpers float to earth like thistledown drift. On the ground, the work was Victorian: dirty, sweaty, scorching as a coal furnace. Daniels, fearless and blessed with seemingly pneumatic legs, had excelled.

For years, unknown to many but close friends and family, Daniels had also worked as a clandestine officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1961, at just 19 years old, he had received a cryptic telephone call about “overseas work.” The caller offered scarce detail but good pay and a promise of adventure. He himself was a trusted former smokejumper — part of a secret recruiting pipeline and operating relationship that had then existed between the CIA and the Forest Service for a decade. Only a few in the smokejumper bureaucracy were privy to its existence; in the general public, no one at all. At the beginning of the Cold War, the CIA had enlisted about a dozen smokejumpers for covert missions in the Far East. The United States’ escalating confrontations with the Soviet Union and China would draw in scores more, including Daniels, with the convective force of a wildfire. Smokejumpers — ranch hands and woodsmen, cowboys and college students — were ideal recruits. They were young and superbly fit, rugged and resilient — and, by the very nature of their work, daring. Wildfire, an unpredictable adversary, demanded free-thinking and improvisation, and unlike conventional soldiering, an ability to operate without much oversight. They were also entirely deniable. Who could say how a skinny cowpoke from Ovando turned up in an equatorial jungle? Smokejumpers, most crucially, were masters of the sky. More so than even World War II paratroopers, an Army airborne division itself inspired by the Forest Service’s earliest smokejumper units, they were aerial wizards — expert at parachuting, hazardous terrain insertions, navigation, and delivering cargo, even as winds or weather buffeted their plane, with precision. Smokejumpers, it was said, could drop a bundle on a postage stamp.

Summoned in hotel rooms in Washington, D.C., CIA handlers had provided Daniels and other jumpers with assumed names and classified briefings. Often, they were told nothing about their mission or destination. Many of them had never been outside Montana; in the nation’s capital, one was astonished to discover pizza. Then they had boarded commercial flights overseas, disappearing into the unknown.

”

Walter Thompson-Hernández

The Compton Cowboys

A New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland Forthcoming from HarperCollins Cultural Reportage

The project:

Judges’ citation:

The Compton Cowboys is a story about trauma and transformation, race and identity, compassion and belonging in one of the most stigmatized cities in America.

Drawing on a year-long immersion with a group of friends who choose horses over gangs and violence, and who struggle to keep their ranch from going under, Walter Thompson-Hernández pushes back against stereotypes to reveal an urban community in complexity, tragedy, and rebirth.

A captivating, sustained examination of a charismatic group of underprivileged men and women who challenge the stereotypes of “gangsta” and cowboy. Everything about this set of interlocking stories of transformation and struggle is compelling: the camaraderie as an alternative to urban gang life (‘Streets raised us, horses saved us’); what the cowboy subculture suggests about the possibilities of intimacy and community in the face of violence; and the universal themes of redemption and finding a sense of self. The book has the potential to disrupt some of the prevalent toxic stereotypes about black urban experience. Thompson-Hernández writes with rigor, gusto, and compassion, allowing his protagonists — who have given him unparalleled access — to be more than victims or villains. There is a hope in these pages that is neither blind nor cheap: it’s vexed and it’s real and it’s genuine, bringing a sense of possibility rather than despair to our conversations about inequality in American life.

Walter Thompson-Hernández is a Los Angeles-based New York Times reporter and host.

Before joining the Styles desk, he was part of a multimedia Times reporting team called “Surfacing” that covers marginalized and offbeat communities. He has written for NPR, Fusion, The Guardian, Remezcla, and other media outlets, and has reported from every continent and throughout the United States. He received his master’s degree in Latin American Studies from Stanford University, and was enrolled in the UCLA Chicano Studies Ph.D. program for one year before leaving to write for the Times. Before graduate school, Walter played professional basketball throughout Latin America.

“Long before Anthony learned to put a saddle on a horse, before he learned how to keep a Stetson crisp by brushing it counter-clockwise, he was a gangster. He’d been jumped into the Acacia Blocc Crips at the age of eight.

It had been shortly after Anthony dropped out of middle school when Black told him about a woman he wanted him to meet. When they arrived, they were hit by the pungent smell of hay and stables, and the whimsical and frequent neighs of the horses. A large sign above the entry read, “Compton Junior Posse: Equestrian Club, Est. 1988” and showed a horse rearing, as if it meant to throw off its rider. Anthony had never seen that word before, “equestrian,” but a posse was like a gang, wasn’t it? If so, then what did that make a cowboy? He didn’t have much time to figure it out, because a woman was already walking toward them. She was wearing a cowboy hat with a blue stripe and clutched beneath her arm was a dusty leather saddle. She had kind, sparkling eyes, and a purposeful stride. “You must be Anthony,” Mayisha said, extending her free hand.

As Anthony’s first year in the Los Angeles County Jails began to round out, he found himself spending less and less time on the prison yard and more time in the solitude of his own cell. Though it had been years since he last rode a horse, in isolation his mind kept returning to the horses at Mayisha’s ranch. Minutes turned into hours and hours turned into days as he dreamed about the feeling of riding bareback through the streets of Compton. When his cell gates opened up twice a day for recreation, he stayed inside and did pushups. He was slowly withdrawing from prison life and an environment meant to control him.

He began to draw aspects of the ranch that were vivid in his memory. He drew the contour of the giant oak tree that housed hundreds of chirping birds every morning. He drew groups of black boys and girls riding on horses, wearing light blue t-shirts like the ones Mayisha required everyone to wear on the ranch.

The first time he drew horses, they looked nothing like horses. The figures were weirdly shaped, brown blotches that barely resembled an animal. He began checking out books out from the prison library. He checked out children’s books, history books, and animal books; anything with images that could serve as a model to improve his drawing.

Inmates weren’t allowed to have colored pencils or paint because correctional officers feared they could be turned into makeshift narcotics that could be sniffed or ingested, but Anthony devised a method for creating watercolor in his cell using Skittles candy, a highly sought-after favorite among inmates. If the candy’s dye could leave a mark on his fingers, he thought, then they would be sure to leave a mark on a sheet of paper. He dipped some into a bowl of water one afternoon and shouted with excitement, almost loud enough for the guards to burst in and shut his secret operation down.

Anthony learned that if he wanted to paint a brown horse, he should mix red, blue, and yellow candies. In the early hours of the morning, while his cellmate groaned in the top bunk, Anthony crouched near the bars, painting under the dull, flickering light outside of his cell. Every week on the phone, he told Lozita, his girlfriend and mother of his two children, about his plans to work on the ranch once he got out. He told her that if he hadn’t stopped riding horses, he would never have gone to jail.

”

Ilyon Woo

Master Slave Husband Wife An American Love Story Forthcoming from 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster History/Biography

The project:

Judges’ citation:

Marrying high drama with deep archival research, Master Slave Husband Wife is the first work of narrative nonfiction about Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved couple who fled bondage in daring disguise, with Ellen passing as a disabled white master and William posing as his slave.

Master Slave Husband Wife draws on exhaustive research to tell the story of two fugitive enslaved people repurposing the toxic archetypes of their era to secure their freedom. Almost as soon as the Crafts escaped, they started turning themselves into a tale — one that continued to place them in danger. As an action story, it is thrilling; but it is the aftermath of the couple’s escape, meticulously researched

by Woo, that captures a particularly American combination of hope and tragedy. Their journey effectively exposes a cross-section of the country in an important historical moment. Woo demonstrates a gripping mastery of story and takes dazzling risks. She conceives of the Crafts’ escape not only as an example of their love for each other but also as a challenge to the nation; their experience complicates our notions of a happy ending. This is a moment in which the public is more willing than ever to grapple with the dark complexity of slavery’s legacy, and Woo’s book will be a contribution to this expanding discussion.

Ilyon Woo is the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times (Atlantic Monthly Press). Woo has lectured widely, spoken on NPR, and written for the Wall Street Journal. Her many research awards began with one she received at sixteen from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Woo holds a B.A. in the Humanities from Yale and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia.

“They have scarcely slept these past few nights, as they rehearsed the moves they now perform. Ellen removes her gown, forgoing a corset, for once, though she needs to reshape her body in other ways, flatten or bind the swell of her breasts. She pulls on a fine white shirt, a long vest and jacket, slim-legged pants, and handsome cloak to cover it all. She does up the buttons, breathing in the late December cold. Christmas is coming soon.

She dresses by candlelight, which flickers through the cottage, “her” workshop, locked with a key, the least of what she’ll lose if she is caught. All around are the tools of her trade — workbaskets stocked with needles and thread, sewing clamps, scissors, cloth.

Ellen slips her feet into gentleman’s boots, thick-soled and solid. Though she has practiced, they must feel strange: an inch of leaden weight pulling each sole to the ground, an inch she needs. Ellen may have inherited her father’s pale skin tone, but not his height. Even for a woman, she is small.

William towers beside her, casting long shadows as he moves. They must do something with her hair, which he has just cut — gather it up, pack it. To leave it behind would be to leave a clue for whoever eventually storms down the door.

There are the final touches: a silky black cravat and green-tinted glasses, also the bandages. Ellen wears one around her chin, another around her hand, which she props up in a sling. They hide her smoothness, her fear, her scars.

Ellen stands, now, at the center of the floor, transformed. To all appearances, she is a sick, rich, young white man — “a most respectable looking gentleman,” in her husband’s words. He is ready too, in his usual pants and shirt, with only one new item, a white, second-hand beaver hat, nicer than anything he has worn before, the marker of a rich man’s slave.

To think it had been a matter of days: Four days since they had first agreed to the idea, first called it possible. Four days of stuffing clothing into locked compartments, sewing, shopping, mapping the way. Four days, they would claim, to prepare for a lifetime of a run. Or, a life of preparation, narrowed down to this.

William blows out the light. They kneel and pray in the sudden dark.

Is that someone listening, watching outside? Just beyond their door is the back of the Collins house, where Master and Mistress should be asleep, in bed. William unlocks the door, pushes it open, peers out. There is just the circle of trees, hardly a whisper in the leaves. Such stillness: he thinks of death. Nevertheless, he gives the sign to go.

Spooked, though, Ellen bursts into tears. They had borne witness to people torn by bloodhounds, beaten and branded, burned alive. They had seen the hunts, the frenzy around a slave chase. All this, they know, might be in store for them. It would be bad enough for her to be caught trying to escape at all. How much worse for Master Collins to awake to learn that his wife’s favored lady’s maid has dared to be a gentleman like him. Collins was a person of careful method, who believed that a punishment should fit a crime, and be instructive. What kind of instruction he would provide in such a case could only be imagined.

”

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