The 2024 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant by whitingfoundation

The 2024 Whit i ng Creat ive

Non fiction Gra nt

Leah Broad

James Duesterberg

Arun Kundnani

Sarah Esther Maslin

Hettie O’Brien

Emily Ogden

Nadim Roberts

Heather Ann Thompson

Ronald Williams II

Hannah Zeavin

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 to be published in Canada, the United Kingdom, or the United States. It is intended to encourage original and ambitious projects by giving grantees the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition.

T he Recipients of t he 2024

Whit i ng Creat ive Non fiction Gra nt

This Woman’s War: Women and Music in World War II

To be published by Faber & Faber (UK) Cultural History

Dr. Leah Broad is the author of Quartet: How Four Women Challenged the Musical World, which won the 2024 Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Storytelling and a 2023 Presto Books of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize. Leah won the 2015 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism, and her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Observer, the New Statesman, Financial Times, and London Review of Books, among others. Selected as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and a member of the Royal Historical Society, she is a frequent on-air guest and regularly appears as a public speaker at events including the BBC Proms.

Judges’ citation:

This book offers a revelatory angle on a colossal historical event, transforming what we think we know about women’s experience of war. Driving each chapter is Leah Broad’s curiosity about what it felt like for women to live in the public realm as musicians—and in often harrowing circumstances. A gifted biographical writer, she presents a fresh and kaleidoscopic account that is deeply serious about why sound and music matter. The research is seamlessly integrated into the narrative, and the writing is clear as a bell. This book brings performance to the page.

The project:

This Woman’s War is a history of World War II told through the unsung lives of women musicians who entertained the troops, composed original work, fought for their country in secret, and kept hope alive on the home front. Crossing Britain, Europe, Russia, and the United States, it shows how women musicians shaped wartime culture, and how their lives changed because of the conflict. It brings together the stories of pianists Elly Ney and Myra Hess; dancers Josephine Baker and Tatiana Vecheslova; composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor; violinist Alma Rosé; and jazz band the International Sweethearts of Rhythm.

Avril was well aware that the odds were stacked against her. It was difficult not to take the relentless criticisms personally, but she tried to maintain a belief in her abilities and her work. “Never be discouraged by criticism even if it means waiting years to gain real recognition,” she wrote, addressing herself as much as anybody else. “If you lay down your pen just because some critics have written scathing remarks about what you considered was your ‘masterpiece,’ you are admitting to yourself and everyone else that you are a failure.” So from her little blue house on a Scottish firth, Avril composed, accompanied by her white cat—and the cat’s five kittens, when they came.

As Japan attacked the Philippines in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Avril followed the movements of General Douglas MacArthur and his divisions closely in the British newspapers. Defense after defense fell, until MacArthur and his family were evacuated to Australia in March 1942. It was a catastrophic defeat and the largest US surrender in history, but the story of a plucky general standing up to the overwhelming might of the Japanese army appealed to a British and American public desperate for some good news. MacArthur was portrayed as a hero even as he was being flown out of the Philippines. He was “one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of America’s war strategists,” according to the British papers. This valorous image fired Avril’s imagination. In April 1942, she started writing MacArthur, an enormous choral and orchestral work that would be a sonic portrait of the “great soldier.”

There are traces of the military campaign that inspired the work in the form of a martial tune whistled by the men’s chorus, but for the most part Avril’s response focused on the human impact of the conflict. Behind violent, cacophonous music symbolizing “the tumult of war,” she puts a wordless woman’s chorus, never coming to the fore but always there in the background, like “a kind of prayer.” And then, after the maelstrom of these clashing voices, Avril brings in a child’s voice, a solo to imbue the work with “an atmosphere of calm and tranquility.” The child concludes the work, not the martial material. It’s a remarkable vision of shared humanity and compassion in an increasingly fractured world, and a plea for peace—quite different to the bombastic and brassy Epic March by John Ireland, composed in the same year as a joint commission from the BBC and the Ministry of Information. The Epic March opened the 1942 Proms in London and has since been recorded multiple times; MacArthur is yet to receive its world premiere. When the BBC considered MacArthur for performance—and John Ireland was on the judging panel—they rejected it on the grounds that her abilities were insufficient to do the composition justice.

James Duesterberg

Final Fantasy: A Secret History of the Present

To be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) and Penguin Press (UK) Cultural History

James Duesterberg holds a PhD in English from the University of Chicago, where he has taught American literature and aesthetics. His writing on topics from generative AI to film and literature to political philosophy and cultural trends has appeared in The Boston Review, The Nation, Jewish Currents, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Point, where he is also an editor. He lives in New York.

Judges’ citation:

A markedly creative and assured mind is at work in this rich and textured examination of how we’ve arrived at our current political moment. James Duesterberg is uniquely at ease mapping evolutions in ideas and technology, such as reactionary thought and AI, and how history reaches forward to shape systems that govern our lives. Paradox, he makes clear, runs through our cultural veins. Capsizing assumptions about what divides the left from the right, this book energizes us to think anew about where we’re headed.

The project:

A narrative history of the postwar political imagination, Final Fantasy weaves together the emergence of information theory in computing and public policy, structuralism in philosophy, and avant-gardism in culture. It tracks the breakdown of the liberaldemocratic consensus and the rise, in its place, of the dream of an automatically functioning society that bypasses any need for individual decision-making, political debate, or collective action. Following the lives of important figures such as Claude LéviStrauss, inventor of structuralism, Sylvère Lotringer, synthesizer of postmodern thought with the 70s cultural underground, and Nick Land, who fused cyberculture with radical theory and became a major influence on the new right, Final Fantasy shows how the utopian logic of art—when cut free from a guiding belief in human freedom and political action— transforms into a dystopian engine of social collapse.

As it happened, Russia’s revolution did not spark a worldwide communist revolt, and Dada burned itself out in a blaze of nihilist glory. But the cracks that had opened in the European order had not been closed. In Paris—still the capital of European high culture— the Surrealists took up the torch from Dada, and instead of setting the world on fire, they brought the flame into the bourgeoisie’s crumbling interiors. In 1924, poet André Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” proclaimed a war against the reign of logic and classification, what he called “the pretense of civilization and progress.” Beneath this fantasy of order and progress was something darker and alluring—a realm, whose discovery Breton credited to Freud, where in “the depths of our mind … strange forces” lurked. Breton had read Freud while caring for shell-shocked soldiers at the Saint-Dizier asylum during World War I. These forces that were buried in the psyche were also, the Surrealists believed, latent in the everyday world. Styling themselves as primitives and naifs, they imagined ordinary industrial objects as talismans of an inscrutable power, and created art that brought these chthonic forces to the surface: the melting clock and the lobster telephone, the teacup made of fur and the phallus dotted with spikes, the pipe that is not a pipe and the metronome that looks back at you, and the sewing machine whose fate it is to meet an umbrella on an operating table. There was energy lurking in these objects cast off by civilization in its unending quest for “progress.” They told a story, but it was not quite history. Their power lay precisely in how they failed to fit into the official narrative of progress and order. It was as if history itself had an unconscious, a traumatic kernel that simply couldn’t be made to fit with the narrative of rational progress. And while Freud, still at heart an Enlightenment thinker, had hoped psychoanalysis could become a true science of the unconscious, bringing the dark forces of the id under the rational ego’s control, the Surrealists wanted to unleash them.

I Rise in Fire: H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, and the Long Revolution

To be published by Doubleday (US)

Biography Arun Kundnani

Arun Kundnani is the author of various books on race, radicalism, Islam, and surveillance, including The Muslims are Coming! (Verso Books), which reported on the experiences of Muslims in the US during the War on Terror. Essays and articles by Kundnani have appeared in The Washington Post, the Guardian, The Nation, HuffPost, and Dissent. Translations have been published in Arabic, Bengali, German, Italian, and Japanese. Born in London, Kundnani was educated at Cambridge University, received a PhD from London Metropolitan University, and now lives in Philadelphia.

Judges’ citation:

Arun Kundnani’s tireless research has established that there is no one better suited to chronicle the life and legacy of Jamil Al-Amin. This rigorous account of a pivotal but little-studied civil rights leader not only sheds light on his achievements and his wrongful imprisonment, but stitches new and profound connections between the backlash against the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and anti-Muslim hysteria after 9/11. It is a gripping, necessary addition to literature on revolutionary politics. Fired by political clarity, this is a significant work.

The project:

Charting a revolutionary life that reshapes our understanding of the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and what happened to the radicalism of the 1960s, I Rise in Fire tells the story of Jamil Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, a civil rights activist who served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and as the Black Panthers’ Minister of Justice, and who is currently incarcerated for life. Kundnani is the only person to have interviewed Al-Amin, following a legal complaint to the Federal Bureau of Prisons arguing that their denial of his interview request was a violation of his First Amendment rights as a writer.

By the time of the landmark four-day National Conference on Black Power, which began in Newark on July 20, 1967, H. Rap Brown was a nationally recognized leader. At the event’s press conference, he appeared in his now distinctive look—natural hair, dark sunglasses, denim jacket, Converse Chuck Taylor sneakers—alongside writer Amiri Baraka, comedian Dick Gregory, Jesse Jackson of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Ron Karenga of the LA-based Black nationalist group US Organization. While much of the event was taken up with developing a policy program to unite Black organizations, the militant spirit which prevailed over the four days was “a tribute to black youth,” as a conference press release noted. To the younger delegates, it was Rap Brown’s speech, most of all, that connected to the underground stream of revolt running through their lives. It was time to “think Black,” he told the conference’s more than one thousand attendees. “Black people are going to be free by any means necessary.” And he presented a new demand. A month earlier, in an interview with the newspaper Muhammad Speaks, Rap had urged the formation of a Black athletes’ union to campaign for a boycott of the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico, an idea that Dick Gregory had also floated. Now, Rap called on the Newark conference to endorse the idea, which it did, setting in train efforts over the coming months to organize Black athletes to join the boycott.

Rap began collaborating with Harry Edwards, who taught at San Jose State College and knew many of the Black sprinters set to represent the US in Mexico City. Later that year Edwards formed the Olympic Project for Human Rights to get athletes on board with the boycott campaign. “Rap understood from day one the political leverage that the Olympic Games afforded Black people in a way that no other arena of political action could,” recalls Edwards. Rap had himself been an outstanding basketball and football player, slated to play quarterback at Southern University before he was kicked out. “A lot of people think Colin Kaepernick was the first Black quarterback to become politicized and to militantly assault racism and injustice in American society,” notes Edwards. “But the first Black quarterback to do that, that I knew, was H. Rap Brown.”

Sarah Esther Maslin

Nothing Stays Buried: Trauma, Truth, and One Town’s Fight for Justice in the After math of a Massacre

To be published by Spiegel & Grau (US) Investigative Reportage/History

Sarah Esther Maslin is a journalist who has worked across Latin America. From 2018 to 2023 she was The Economist ’s Brazil correspondent, and before that, was based in El Salvador. Her reporting has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Nation, VICE, Columbia Journalism Review, and others. She is the recipient of a New America fellowship, an Ochberg fellowship from the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma, an American Society of Magazine Editors NEXT Award, a Mirror Award, a Fetisov Journalism Award, and a spot on the Forbes 30-under-30 list. She has been a writer-in-residence at MacDowell, Mesa Refuge, and the Logan Nonfiction Program. She graduated from Yale University with a degree in history and is based in Mexico City.

Judges’ citation:

Powerful, essential reportage with an astute and deeply empathic heart: Sarah Esther Maslin honors the wrenching story of a massacre in a remote village by showing how it is also a story of power, nations, foreign policy, and cycles of trauma. Nothing Stays Buried underscores America’s role in spurring immigration across its own borders, as well as the brutality and reverberations of proxy conflicts so often minimized in the press. Maslin is a keen, sensitive observer, able to put her moral convictions to work in service of nuanced truth-telling. She brings this conflict, mainly remembered in large-scale political terms, down to human size.

The project:

Over the course of three days in December 1981, Salvadoran soldiers trained and armed by the United States machine-gunned, machete-slashed, bayoneted, and burned to death more than 1,000 civilians in El Mozote, a village in El Salvador, and surrounding rural hamlets. A deeply reported narrative of the long aftermath of this massacre, Nothing Stays Buried traces the lives of the survivors who decided to return and draws a critical portrait of how American foreign policy continues to affect other countries and their citizens long after attention shifts elsewhere.

Their home was a big wooden champa with a dirt floor and a tin roof. Champas are meant to be temporary, but in hard-up places like El Mozote they often become permanent. An oven, refrigerator, and plastic shelves lined one of the walls. A grain silo sat in the corner, surrounded by sacks of beans, rice, and animal feed. A formica table served as the dining area. Outside were a pit latrine and a pila, the concrete wash station found in every rural Salvadoran home.

The structure was sturdy—Orlando had made sure of that—and stayed dry even during tropical storms. But space was finite. As the five Márquez children grew up, the family expanded to include their partners and their own children, all of whom crammed into a single sleeping area each night. They draped sheets over ropes and strung them from the rafters to create a semblance of privacy around each family’s cluster of beds and hammocks. Only the littlest children didn’t mind the cramped quarters. It was time for a new house.

The opportunity came in the fall of 2010, when a Spanish development agency agreed to finance a housing project for El Mozote families. They broke ground on November 12, a clear day at the start of the dry season. From the top of Cerro La Cruz, lines of indigo mountains could be seen in the distance, pressed together like the folds of an accordion.

Orlando assembled his work crew—twenty-four-year-old Orlando Junior and three other men from the village—and showed them where to start digging, at the foot of a bamboo patch near where the kitchen of his childhood home had stood.

It took the workers several hours of heaving and sweating to carve out the first quadrant, a meter or so below ground. The soil was dense and full of debris. Orlando watched until his antsiness drove him off looking for something to do. Then he heard his son cry out.

“Papá!”

Orlando rushed back to find his son frozen at the corner of the site, his shovel on the ground. Beside it, a face stared out from the dirt. Its eye sockets were empty and its jaw and forehead cracked, but its teeth were nearly intact. The porcelain dentures were unmistakable. Orlando leaned in just to make sure. It was his mother’s skull.

They’d also found a shin bone, dug up by one of his workers. By the time the sun disappeared behind Cerro El Chingo, they had amassed a small pile of shrunken bones and dirt-crusted possessions. Orlando and Míriam placed them inside a nylon sack and set it on a chair in the middle of the champa. The dead and the living would end up sharing the house for nearly two years.

Orlando’s accidental discovery was neither the first nor the last in El Mozote. But thanks to its timing, it was the most pivotal. It would put Orlando and his family—unwillingly, at first—at the center of a collective reckoning that was beginning to gather momentum in the village and would soon spread to the rest of the country. El Mozote, like El Salvador, had been rebuilt after the war on a foundation of silence and bones.

It was beginning to crack.

Hettie O’Brien

Diminishing Returns

To be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK) and Grand Central (US) Economics

Hettie O’Brien is an Assistant Opinion Editor at the Guardian and a contributing writer to the Guardian Long Read. She has previously worked for the New Statesman, where she covered economic and social affairs, and as a reporter in Washington, DC, covering corporate monopolies and the Federal Trade Commission. Before becoming a journalist, she worked as a researcher for Rethinking Economics. She has written about economics, politics, and culture for The Times Literary Supplement, The Baffler, The Atlantic, and The Architectural Review, has contributed to radio, including the BBC World at One, and has chaired panels at the Design Museum and Royal Society of Arts. She lives in London.

Judges’ citation:

In swift-moving, lucid prose, Hettie O’Brien makes exceedingly complex financial arrangements not just intelligible, but riveting. She marshals an impressive trove of international research, including hard-won interviews with notoriously elusive financiers, to reveal who is pulling the strings of society, and how. With O’Brien’s eye for a telling quote and gifts of characterization, Diminishing Returns will be an animated and momentous contribution to the ongoing debate about what we can rightly expect from government; it asks, cogently, whom it shields and whom it abandons.

The

project:

The influence of asset managers and private equity firms stretches across the globe and into the very foundations of our societies. Diminishing Returns takes a close look at what happens when your elderly parents’ retirement home, the nursery where you drop your children, or the company that pipes water into your kitchen is taken over by an increasingly intricate and deregulated industry, and profiles the hidden figures who are reshaping our economies and our lives.

Nils Jansson was a strange business partner for Blackstone, the largest commercial landlord in history, given that they preferred to be regarded as a careful steward of pension pots rather than an impulsive Monopoly man. The entire population of Denmark is just over half the size of London, and its real-estate industry is dominated by a tight-knit group of professionals with august credentials. Jansson was an outsider. He came from Holbæk, a hefty harbor town, and studied farming at agricultural college in the early 2000s. He worked for a catering company and then as a manager in a construction firm, finding himself in Copenhagen during the biggest financial boom of the 21st century. Jansson had a hustling, enthusiastic energy, which earned him the nickname “Speedy.” “In the olden days,” said one property investor who used to work with him, “we used to say he could charm a cow out of a flower field.”

Real estate finance can be complicated. What Jansson did was simple. Before the financial crisis, he bought properties from a group of investors who sold buildings to one another at vastly inflated prices. Jansson would buy rundown buildings—“some old crap” as he once put it—then renovate them and sell them on. Eik Bank, a Faroese bank with branches in Denmark, gave Jansson huge loans to buy properties on the basis it would receive a bonus once they were sold. This was legal but extremely risky. The loan depended on the value of properties continuing to rise, while the bonus was a seductive promise that gave bankers an incentive to overlook risk.

Jansson became a big customer at Eik Bank. When the real estate market slowed down in 2009 and the banks stopped lending him money, Jansson went bankrupt. One year later, Eik Bank declared insolvency and was taken over by the state. After the crash, Jansson mostly disappeared from public view. He moved on to a farm and acquired a herd of cattle. He told a journalist that he spent most of his time digging ditches and had no plans to ever start trading real estate again. Among those who had followed the story, “Speedy” was emblematic of the risks and excesses that had caused Denmark’s financial crisis.

Blackstone’s decision to partner with Jansson was like Lloyds of London moving to the US and deciding to go into business with a bankrupt farmer.

From Hettie O’Brien’s previous reportage for the Guardian, “The Blackstone rebellion: how one country took on the world’s biggest commercial landlord,” September 29, 2022.

Emily Ogden

Frailties: How Poe Helps Us Live with Ourselves

To be published by Viking Penguin (US) Literary Biography/Cultural Criticism

Emily Ogden is Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where she specializes in the literature of nineteenth-century America. She is an alumna of the Columbia Society of Fellows, where she was a Mellon Fellow, and the author of the critically praised On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays and Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Yale Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, Critical Inquiry, and American Literature

Judges’ citation:

Alive with a desire to cross-pollinate genre, this bravura hybrid of biography, memoir, and philosophy is mordantly funny and vividly characterized. Emily Ogden is so fully in control of her material and form that she is able to work as a great novelist does, lighting up points of contact for the reader, both intellectual and emotional. She binds us to Poe at his wildest and most terrifying, where he has the most to teach us. Ogden’s confidence and energy on the page are dazzling.

The project:

Frailties is a biography in essays of Edgar Allan Poe that approaches a risky degree of intimacy with its subject. Tracing the mark his life and work left on notable admirers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marie Bonaparte, and Julio Cortázar, Frailties also contemplates how Poe intertwines with the mind of the author herself and helps us navigate the darkness we all share.

When I am tired of Poe, or when I am embarrassed to be spending so much time on him, he appears stunted and puerile, an egomaniac who could not represent anyone in his art because no one but himself counted for him in life. But I also know that to think this way is to apply the wrong standards. Poe was not trying to represent people in his art; that is not what his characters were for. Some fiction writers offer us interiority granted all around, the social world fully and fairly unfolded. We call that realism. Poe was not a realist. It isn’t that his characters are poor models of people; it’s that they are not models of people at all. They are more like voices in the head, or figures in a dream.

With each character, Poe models not a single person but a single drive; just one impulsion a person might feel rising up from within. The drive might be to obliterate a source of shame, or to get to the bottom of things, or to take revenge. Or it might be more elemental: in “The Premature Burial” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the drive is simply to live, as an infant or an animal feels compelled to live. The living thing must get back up out of the grave. In Poe’s stories, we return to that part of ourselves that would, like a fox, gnaw off its leg to escape a trap; or that did, as an infant, wail for succor from the abyss of helplessness.

Poe is trying to describe what it is like to be prey to one’s wishes; what it is like to be driven into motion. If his subject could be described as life, it is life experienced as the infliction of activity; only life itself, and not yet life as a social or ethical or political matter. It is not always pleasant to wish to live. Wishing to live can be a horror. That is why Poe is also so interested in what it would be like to die.

Nadim Roberts

The Highway

To be published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart (Canada) and Spiegel & Grau (US) History/Cultural Reportage

Nadim Roberts is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. Born in Canada and based in London, England, his work has been published in Granta, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, and The Globe and Mail. He has reported in more than two dozen countries on four continents on breaking news, features, and longform investigations. His work has been nominated for an Emmy Award and a National Magazine Award in Canada.

Judges’ citation:

The Highway is rendered with the delicate light and shadow only achieved through sustained, up-close reporting. Nadim Roberts’s telling of this heart-stopping story brings into full and shocking relief the Canadian government’s kidnapping of Indigenous children and their forced enrollment in residential schools, as well as the lasting mark these practices have left on Indigenous culture. This is a rare mix of propulsive narrative and searching reflection on cultural and national identity.

The project:

In 1972, three Inuit boys ran away from a residential school in the Canadian Arctic, vanishing into the tundra. Weeks later, only one of the boys reappeared in his hometown, near death after a 150-kilometer journey through the wilderness. Half a century later, the story of the three boys resurfaced when a long-awaited highway to the Arctic Ocean, following the same route the surviving boy took to get home, was nearing completion. The Highway tells the tale of these three boys and their families, the legacy of Arctic colonization, and how a road to the end of the continent continues to affect their communities today.

On the day Annie Neglek was taken she saw a small speck of a plane in the sky. It grew bigger and bigger till it flew right over her family’s summer camp on the shores of Bathurst Inlet in the Central Arctic. The plane seemed to be looking for them, and once spotted, it landed on its pontoons in the nearby bay. It was the summer of 1959, and Annie was thirteen years old.

Two men got out of the plane and walked towards their canvas tent pitched on the tundra. Annie didn’t recognize either of them. The pilot was a white man and his co-pilot an Inuk. The white man spoke while the Inuk translated into Inuinnaqtun so her parents could understand. Annie couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but her parents kept glancing over at the children.

Annie was the second oldest of her twelve siblings, eleven girls and one boy. She often looked after her siblings while her parents fished and hunted, prepared the dry meat or sewed their caribou and sealskin-lined clothing for winter. Their big family was close, a village unto themselves. In summer, they all slept together in their tent side by side on a long roll of caribou skin. In winter, it was the same, but in an igloo built by her father. The tundra was their home, their playground, and their classroom.

After the men finished speaking to her parents, they called Annie and her older sister over. Her parents explained they would need to go with these men on their plane. There wasn’t time to explain where they were going or why. They had to leave now.

On arrival, there were cars waiting for all the children. On the bumpy ride along a dirt road, Annie looked out the window at this new place. She felt suffocated almost to the point of fainting. It felt as if the surroundings were closing in on her. Later, she would learn that these tall obstacles to her vision were called trees. On the tundra, the land had extended as far as the eye could see.

The car stopped in front of what looked like the biggest canvas tent Annie had ever seen. There were many white people here who spoke to them in English, but Annie couldn’t understand what they were saying. Once inside, they were made to line up and take off the clothing sewn by their mothers. They were inspected for lice and then covered in a smelly powder. Nuns with electric clippers shaved the boys’ hair right down to their scalps. By the time they reached the boys at the end of the line, the clippers were red hot and the smell of burning hair filled the air.

Finally, they were taken to their dormitories where there were rows upon rows of beds a meter apart from each other. Alone in her new bed—in a new world—Annie finally allowed herself to cry. She was afraid the other kids would tease her, so she covered her head with a pillow. But she wasn’t alone. All around her children were crying. The next day, they would be woken up early. It was their first day of school.

Heather Ann Thompson

Fear and Fury: Bernhard Goetz and the Rebirth of White Vigilantism in America

To be published by Pantheon Books (US)

History

Heather Ann Thompson is a historian and the Pulitzer Prize- and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. This 2016 book received five additional book prizes and was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. She writes regularly on the criminal justice system for myriad publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Thompson’s policy work includes serving on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the US. She also co-runs the Carceral State Research Project at the University of Michigan.

Judges’ citation:

A masterful, fine-tuned work by a world-class historian. Working from new and archival interviews, newspaper accounts, legal files, and more, Heather Ann Thompson handles this once-notorious, now almost-forgotten event with meticulous care. She moves deftly among points of view to create a kinetic, minute-by-minute account and gives us what the media of the day missed: an understanding of how victims had their victimhood taken from them. Fear and Fury will be a landmark reframing of the modern resurgence of white vigilante violence.

The project:

Drawing from never-before-seen materials and challenging deeply held assumptions about what actually happened on a New York City subway car in 1984, when a white loner gunned down four unarmed Black teenagers, Fear and Fury shines new light on one of the most notorious events of the Reagan Era. As this forthcoming history makes clear, that one brutal act of vigilantism, and the entire decade of the 1980s, matter in ways that we have failed to appreciate. Indeed, the toxic cocktail of white rage and resentment that bubbles below the surface of virtually every public encounter today was mixed and aggressively marketed in that moment. With stunning rapidity, an unapologetic villain would become a celebrity, his four victims would become “thugs” and “animals,” and the nation’s future would never be the same.

At 10:10 p.m. Shirley Cabey heard knocking at her apartment door. This was unsettling for so many reasons. But as she peered out of the peephole, she relaxed. It was just her neighbor. She was smiling as she unlocked the door, but felt her heart start to beat a little too fast after the woman standing in front of her asked, anxiety straining her voice, if Shirley’s son Darrell was at home. Why, Shirley asked with mounting dread. Because, her neighbor explained, she had just received a call from the transit police informing her that her own son had been shot in the city. But that couldn’t be right, she went on. Her boy was accounted for. Maybe the officers had meant to call Shirley, she ventured nervously? After all, these women had similar last names, and Shirley’s number was unlisted.

As if she were wading through molasses, Shirley turned, made her way over to the phone that hung on the living room wall, and began to dial.

Thirty minutes later she was sitting in her cousin’s car, with her mother in the backseat, racing to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. As the trio sped past countless high rises framed by the night sky, many with small Christmas trees twinkling hopefully in their windows, Shirley’s mother tried valiantly to persuade her daughter that even if it was their Darrell, things might not be that bad. Shirley clung to these words. Her mom had spent her career working as a nurses’ aide. She would know.

But when Shirley finally managed to get past the desk clerk, and to meet with the doctor who had sat her down in the cold and harshly lit family room near the ER, she learned that her son’s situation was actually worse than bad. “Mrs. Cabey,” he told her solemnly, “there was nothing we could do. The bullet severed his spinal cord. Darrell will be paralyzed from the waist down. He will never walk again.” All Shirley could manage to ask was if Darrell knew. No, the doctor mumbled. It would be better for her to explain this to him in the morning. For now, someone else told her, it would probably be best if she headed home. Dazed, Shirley complied.

The next morning, she rushed back to the hospital. Retracing the steps that her son had taken just the day before, Shirley boarded the M55 bus and then switched to the downtown 2 train. Eventually she arrived at 14th Street; the very same subway station that the man who had shot her son had entered less than twenty-four hours earlier.

As Shirley stood looking down at her barely recognizable boy, hooked up as he now was to the many hissing tubes and whirring machines that tethered his slight frame to the dimly lit ICU bed, she felt helpless. According to the nurses, Shirley would only be allowed a ten-minute visit. Part of her was relieved. Perhaps Darrell would just keep sleeping and then she might not have to tell him, not just yet, how badly he had been hurt.

As if he sensed his mother’s presence, Darrell stirred, and with his fingers fluttering weakly, he tried to reach out to her. But then his face began slowly to contort in confusion and fear as he registered the anguished look in his mother’s eyes. Unsure what was going on and overwhelmed by his mother’s pain, Darrell began to choke up, tears coming unbidden and uncontrollably as he looked up at her and whispered, “I’m sorry, Mama; I am so sorry.”

Ronald Williams II

Black Embassy: Trans Africa and the Struggle for Foreign Policy Justice

To be published by University of North Carolina Press (US)

Political History

Ronald Williams II is a historian, writer, consultant, and former professor. He has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California, Berkeley, from which he also earned a PhD in African American Studies. A native of Oakland, California, he lives in Durham, North Carolina with his daughters, Zora and Macy.

Judges’ citation:

Ronald Williams II has crafted a definitive and surprisingly intimate guide through the lifespan of a powerful political organization that refused to accept the limited scope of American foreign policy. Written in confident, lively prose, Black Embassy does especially important work in bringing forth the crucial contributions of African Americans to ending apartheid in South Africa. There is no more knowledgeable scholar on this topic; Williams has been working on this project for almost twenty years, and it shows. This book is a well of knowledge that readers will draw from for generations.

The project:

Black Embassy is an institutional history of the African American foreign advocacy organization TransAfrica, which is most known for its pivotal role in galvanizing American anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s through the Free South Africa Movement. Drawing on extensive archival research and more than 100 original interviews, the book sets out to cover virtually every development in American foreign policy vis-à-vis Africa and the Caribbean since World War II. More broadly, it chronicles the efforts of African Americans to wield influence in US foreign relations, as told through the remarkable story of this onceprominent organization. Black Embassy also offers the most extensive treatment of the life and work of TransAfrica’s co-founder and longtime president, Randall Robinson, distinguished on the world stage as a champion for human rights and global justice for people of African descent.

At just shy of 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 21, 1984, TransAfrica’s president Randall Robinson entered the South African Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC. Joining him were Mary Frances Berry, a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights; Georgetown University law professor and former chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Eleanor Holmes Norton; and District of Columbia Congressional Delegate Walter Fauntroy. The purpose of their visit was to meet with South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Bernardus G. Fourie. They wanted to discuss contemporary problems and issues in South Africa and the relationship between Pretoria and Washington. At least, this was how the ambassador understood the agenda.

Not long after their arrival, Robinson and his colleagues were escorted to the ambassador’s office on the embassy’s second floor, where they began their conversation with Ambassador Fourie and two members of his staff. The meeting got off to a good start. The ambassador discussed South Africa’s policies with his guests, including an explanation of the newly adopted constitution. Everyone seemed pleased with the tone and direction of the conversation, albeit for different reasons. Things were moving along so well with the ambassador that, as Robinson recalls, “after a time he almost audibly relaxed as if deciding that these black leaders were more reasonable than he could have hoped for. At the fortyfive-minute mark, he even seemed to be enjoying himself.”

At that point, Eleanor Holmes Norton politely excused herself from the meeting and exited the embassy.

Meanwhile, Ambassador Fourie continued discussions with Berry, Fauntroy, and Robinson for about ten more minutes before one of his aides beckoned him to step outside of the room. Returning several minutes later and looking absolutely shocked, Fourie informed his guests of what he had just learned. “We’re getting calls from the press. Mrs. Norton is outside telling the media that the three of you will not leave until your demands are met.” Robinson calmly stated: “Mr. Ambassador, please convey to your government our basic demand, which is twofold. All of your government’s political prisoners must be released immediately. These would include, among others, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, the thirteen labor leaders arrested recently without charge, and the three black leaders who have taken refuge in the British consulate in Durban. We are further demanding that your government commit itself immediately and publicly to the speedy dismantlement of the apartheid system with a timetable for this task.”

The ambassador attempted to negotiate with Robinson and his associates, but, to his chagrin, they insisted that they would stay until their demands were met. Knowing that the ambassador could not force his government’s hand even if he wanted to, one of his aides asked if there was anything else they could do to get the protesters to retreat. Mary Frances Berry replied with a simple, “No.” That was the end of that.

Hannah Zeavin

All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance

To be published by Penguin Press (US) and Fern Press (UK) Cultural History/Biography

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar and editor, author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy and Mother Media: Hot and Cold Parenting in the 20th Century (forthcoming this April), both with MIT Press. Her criticism and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Bookforum, n+1, the Guardian, and elsewhere. Zeavin was also a recipient of a 2022 Work in Progress Grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation for an essay about the children of psychoanalysis, “Composite Case,” which became the basis for this book. In 2021, Zeavin co-founded The Psychosocial Foundation and is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis, a new magazine for psychoanalysis. She works as an Assistant Professor of the History of Science at UC Berkeley.

Judges’ citation:

A ferociously intelligent investigation of psychoanalysis as a story of inheritance. Artful and astute, All Freud’s Children reveals how axiomatic theories are created from subjective experience and illuminates the humanity of the people who developed them. Hannah Zeavin’s field of play is the fraught and unexplored site of the analyst’s family as both subject and object of theories of psychoanalysis; the family romance, in other words, is even more central than we think. All Freud’s Children will prove a brilliant examination of what’s at stake when the particular is made to stand for the universal.

The project:

All Freud’s Children is a group biography of noteworthy psychoanalysts and their children—beginning with Sigmund and Anna Freud—that traces some of the most significant contributions of psychoanalysis back to their intimate origins. Framed by personal reflections from the author’s own experience of being raised by analysts, it examines how the home lives of these thinkers—including the development and inner lives of their children—shaped the theories that made them famous.

My son demands that I chase him. He wants me to be both predator and enveloping “mama,” and he will be the little bunny. “Chase me,” he exclaims as I close my laptop. As we near the completion of a loop, he turns back around and shouts, “Save me, Mama, a predator is after me,” and I scoop him up and say, “Of course I will protect you.” We march off to our burrow, the couch. Then the demand comes again. “Chase me.”

I understand that I will protect him, as best I can. I also know, like all parents, the work of being his mother will include becoming acquainted with failing to do so. Here, he shows me that I must protect him not only from the world out there, but from the part of me that persecutes him, chases him, consumes him, kills him. I also understand that this is impossible: the predation has already taken place, which is how he knows how to play it through.

I recount this story to my mother, and others like it, such as my child’s sudden bravery around heights or some other triviality we alone treat as holy. She delights—then she remarks, “See, it’s … ”—then launches into a psychoanalytic formulation, leaning in like the manicurist in The Women, in giddy spirits, making a confession that takes the other as subject instead of oneself. She offers me an interpretation—“You see, Hannah, what he is doing is splitting”—deploying her analytic lore. On the occasion of chase me/save me, my mother’s interpretation, and mine too, is from psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. Splitting is the term Melanie Klein used for the behavior all infants take up unconsciously, to capture their experiences and cleave them “between wholly good ones with ‘good’ objects and wholly bad experiences with ‘bad’ objects.” Mother is both herself—good, beloved, savior—and not mother at all, an external threat that will eat him up alive.

Of course, we knew this long before Klein gave us a name for it. In the Bible, Solomon devises a test, a trap. Two women come forward to claim a baby. He offers to cleave the baby in two. The woman who refuses is understood to be the true mother, whatever that means. What Solomon doesn’t understand is that it is the child that fails this test—they must, to preserve their sanity, divide their parents into parts. Mother, predator, no matter. We are splitting creatures, trying to preserve the good from being touched by the bad. To do so, we will oscillate wildly, taking turns, like a game.

Whiting Foundation Trustees and Officers

Peter Pennoyer, President

John N. Irwin III, Treasurer

Amanda Foreman

Kumar Mahadeva

Jacob Collins

Magdalena Zavalía Miguens, Secretary

Trustees Emeriti

Antonia M. Grumbach

Kate Douglas Torrey

Permissions

Excerpt from This Woman’s War: Women and Music in World War II (working title) by Leah Broad. Copyright © 2024 by Leah Broad. All Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s copyright material appears courtesy of her estate. To be published by Faber & Faber. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from Final Fantasy: A Secret History of the Present (working title) by James Duesterberg. Copyright © 2024 by James Duesterberg. To be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from I Rise in Fire: H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, and the Long Revolution (working title) by Arun Kundnani. Copyright © 2024 by Arun Kundnani. To be published by Knopf Doubleday. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “The Blackstone rebellion: how one country took on the world’s biggest commercial landlord,” the Guardian, September 29, 2022 by Hettie O’Brien. Copyright © 2024 by Hettie O’Brien. All rights reserved.

Excerpt(s) by Heather Ann Thompson, copyright © 2024 by Heather Ann Thompson; from FEAR AND FURY by Heather Ann Thompson, forthcoming from Pantheon Books in Fall 2026. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved

Excerpt from Black Embassy: TransAfrica and the Struggle for Foreign Policy Justice (working title) by Ronald Williams II. Copyright © 2024 by Ronald Williams II. To be published by University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Excerpt(s) by Hannah Zeavin, copyright © 2024 by Hannah Zeavin; from ALL FREUD’S CHILDREN by Hannah Zeavin, forthcoming from Penguin Press in Spring 2026. Used by permission of Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

The Whiting Foundation info@whiting.org whiting.org

@WhitingFdn