Brenda Wineapple

Nonfiction writer, essayist, and literary critic, Brenda Wineapple is the author, most recently, of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial that Riveted a Nation, as well as six other books, including The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, selected by a New York Times book critic as one of the 10 best nonfiction works of 2019; Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, a New York Times 'Notable Book' that combines political cultural history to tell the complex story of how America faced the crime of slavery, and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her other prize-winning books include Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner; Sister Brother Gertrude and Leo Stein; and Hawthorne: A Life, winner of the Ambassador Award. 

She also edited The Selected Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier for the Library of America's Poets Series, and the anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Writers and Writing. A recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting, and a Pushcart Prize, she has also received three National Endowment Fellowships plus its Public Scholars Award. Her essays and reviews regularly appear in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2023, she was named a Fellow at the Dorothy B. and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and lives in NYC with her husband, the composer Michael Dellaira.