Hilton Als

Hilton Als (born 1960) is an American writer and theater critic. He is a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker, for which he won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. He received a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in 2016, and his books include The Women and White Girls (2013). 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.

Background and career 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. 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."

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.

Awards and honors 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism) shortlist for White Girls 2016 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Nonfiction) 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism 2017 Langston Hughes Medal, City College of New York 2018 Honorary doctorate, The New School 2020 Queerty Pride50 honoree 2024 Honorary doctorate, Syracuse University