Hilton Als

Als is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. He is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and former editor-at-large at Vibe.

Hilton Als studied at Columbia University. The recorded working language is English. Places of work recorded in the authority are New York City. Employment is recorded with Smith College and Columbia University. Works named in the authority record are The women and The First Step of Becoming an Art Historian. Work by Hilton Als is recorded in the collections of Harvard Film Archive. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, Lambda Literary Award, Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes and Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

• Name — Hilton Als • Born — 1960 • Birthplace — New York City, U.S. • Occupation — * Writer • critic • Genre — Theatre criticism • Awards — * Pulitzer Prize for Criticism • National Book Critics Circle Award • Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes • Education — Columbia University

Hilton Als was born in New York City, with roots in Barbados. Raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, he has four older sisters and one younger brother. He studied toward a bachelor's in art history from Columbia University. His 1996 book The Women focuses on his mother (who raised him in Brooklyn), Dorothy Dean, and Owen Dodson, who was a mentor and lover of Als. In the book, Als explores his identification of the confluence of his ethnicity, gender and sexuality, moving from identifying as a "Negress" and then an "Auntie Man", a Barbadian term for homosexuals. His 2013 book White Girls continued to explore race, gender, identity in a series of essays about everything from the AIDS epidemic to Richard Pryor's life and work. Als received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2000 for creative writing and the 2002–03 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. In 2004 he won the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, which provided him half a year of free working and studying in Berlin. In addition to Columbia, he has taught at Smith College, Wellesley College, Wesleyan University, and Yale University, and his work has also appeared in The Nation, The Believer, and the New York Review of Books. In 2017, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism: "For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race." The Guardian wrote about him a year later: "Since winning his Pulitzer prize for criticism, Hilton Als has risen more visibly to the role of public intellectual, one that he plays particularly well." As an art curator, Als has been responsible for exhibitions including the group show Forces in Nature (featuring work by such artists as Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Peter Doig, Chris Ofili, Celia Paul, Tal R, Sarah Sze, Kara Walker, and Francesca Woodman) in 2015, and an exhibition of work from the Manhattan years of portraitist Alice Neel, entitled Alice Neel, Uptown, at David Zwirner Gallery in New York City and Victoria Miro Gallery in London (May 18 – July 29, 2017). In June 2020, Als was named an inaugural Presidential Visiting Scholar at Princeton University for the 2020–2021 academic year. In 2024, Als guest curated This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance, at the National Portrait Gallery; the exhibit included works of by Beauford Delaney, Bernard Gotfryd, and Faith Ringgold among others.