Nicholas T Boggs

Twentieth and twenty-first century literatures in English, especially American literature and African American literature; James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison; gender and sexuality studies; literary biography; hybrid genres; creative writing.

Modern Language Association; Association of Writing Professionals; Biographer's International Organization; NYU Biography Seminar

Writer-in-Residence, The James Merrill House, January 2021; MacDowell Colony Fellow, Summer 2021; Robert and Ina Caro Travel and Research Fellowship, Biographer's International Organization, Summer 2019; Fellowship, The Camargo Foundation Core Program in the Arts and Humanities, Cassis, France, 2018; Residency, The Corporation of Yaddo, 2017; Scholarship in Non-Fiction, Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, 2011-2013; Jerome Foundation Travel Grant, Paris and Saint Paul-de-Vence, France, 2013; Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for Humanities, Wesleyan University, 2005-2006; Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, Columbia University, 2003-2004.

Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate at Yale when he discovered James Baldwin's out-of-print "children's book for adults," Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The senior thesis he wrote about it was published in the anthology James Baldwin Now (NYU, 1999). A subsequent essay that draws on his interviews in Paris with the book's illustrator, French artist Yoran Cazac, appears in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (2015). This research led him to co-edit and write the introduction to a new edition of Little Man, Little Man (Duke UP, 2018), which Entertainment Weekly hailed as "brilliant, essential" and the New York Times wrote "couldn't be more timely." He was interviewed by the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly for feature articles on Little Man, Little Man and he appeared on Madeleine Brand's Press Play on KCRW and on Black America TV. He was also featured on a panel about the book at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as well as the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Library of Congress, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, and elsewhere. He is currently at work on a literary biography of Baldwin, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Prof. Boggs will spend the 2020-2021 academic year as a Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY-Graduate Center and as a Faculty Fellow at the NYU Center for the Humanities.

For inquiries about speaking engagements, please see: https://speakersforall.com/speaker/665/