In Short: New Visiting Scholar; Grants for Emerging Artists

Hilton Als, who earned the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for his theater reviews in The New Yorker, will be the INAUGURAL PRESIDENTIAL VISITING SCHOLAR at Princeton during the 2020-21 academic year. The program supports visitors “who can contribute to the University’s diversity, broadly defined,” according to a University release. Als will mentor students in the Lewis Center for the Arts and teach a creative writing and theater course titled “Yaas Queen: Gay Men, Straight Women, and the Literature, Art, Film of Hagdom.”

The Lewis Center for the Arts has awarded 10 additional HODDER FUND GRANTS to support emerging artists in the coming academic year as they pursue their work amid the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Hodder Fellowship program, created in the 1940s, typically supports five fellows each year, and those recipients were named last December: choreographer Kim Brandt, composer/musician Amir ElSaffar, playwright Kimber Lee, visual artist Troy Michie, and writer Casey Plett. The additional smaller grants recognize that the arts world has been deeply affected by the public-health measures put in place to combat the spread of coronavirus. 

“It’s our hope that this award will afford these exceptional artists a bit of time — and belief — to keep at it, for all of our sakes,” Tracy K. Smith, chair of the Lewis Center, said in a news release. The recipients are theater director Lileana Blain-Cruz ’06, visual artist Onyedika Chuke, film director Mark DeChiazza, choreographer Marjani Forté-Saunders, performing artist Jennifer Kidwell, composer and musician Aurora Nealand, poet and journalist Maya Phillips, choreographer Katy Pyle, writer and translator Aaron Robertson ’17, and visual artist Paula Wilson.