Nicholas Boggs receives 2026 Truman Capote Award from UI

Nicholas Boggs, a writer and assistant professor of English and creative writing at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, has been selected as the 2026 recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin.

The $30,000 prize - the largest annual cash prize for English-language literary criticism - is administered by the Iowa Writers' Workshop on behalf of the estate of Truman Capote. A formal award ceremony will take place at 4 p.m. Oct. 14 in the Old Capitol Senate Chamber. Boggs will give a talk about literary criticism, followed by a reception in the Old Capitol rotunda. Both events are free and open to the public.

Boggs is honored for Baldwin: A Love Story, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2025. It is the first major biography of American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin in more than three decades.

In making the selection, the committee noted the significance of Boggs' work.

"Baldwin: A Love Story narrates James Baldwin's life with a rare combination of scholarly meticulousness and novel-like propulsive force. Nicholas Boggs' prose emanates deep care while avoiding hagiography, and his book brings to light little-known facts about Baldwin's last decades," the committee wrote.

In the book, Boggs draws on new archival material, original research, and interviews to show how profoundly Baldwin's personal relationships shaped his life and work. The work is shortlisted for the 2026 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction. It also was a New York Times Notable Book of 2025, an Amazon Best Book of the Year, and a Time Top Book of 2025.

"I am truly so honored to receive the Truman Capote Award. James Baldwin and Capote were contemporaries, and both trailblazing queer writers, so this feels particularly gratifying," Boggs says. "Given the repartee that famously characterized their friendship, I can only imagine what each would have to say about a Baldwin biography being recognized with a prize bearing the Capote name. It's certainly fun to think about."

Boggs co-edited a 2018 edition of Baldwin's collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Gilder Lehrman Center and Beinecke Library at Yale University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Most recently, Boggs was the 2024-25 John Hope Franklin Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he received a BA from Yale University and a PhD from Columbia University, both in English, as well as an MFA in creative writing from American University. He resides in New York City.

The Truman Capote Estate established the Truman Capote Literary Trust in 1994. The creation of the trust was stipulated in the author's will, and the Annual Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin reflects Capote's frequently expressed concern for the health of literary criticism in the English language.

Arvin, in whose memory the award was established, was a critics Capote admired. Arvin's academic career at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, was destroyed in the late 1940s when his homosexuality was exposed.

In addition to administering the literary criticism award, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a graduate program in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Graduate College, awards Truman Capote creative writing fellowships to UI students. Former fellows include this year's inaugural Jack Galef Literary Arts Award winner, Tony Tulathimutte, who received a fellowship in 2010-11.