Events Calendar

On October 8th at 4:30pm, Fred Moten will receive the 2020 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Honor of Newton Arvin for the book, Black and Blur. The Truman Capote Award is a $30,000 prize and is the largest award for literary criticism in English.

Moten is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the African American Literature and Culture Society. A noted scholar, he is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), a three volume collection of essays whose general title is consent not to be a single being, which includes Black and Blur, Stolen Life, and The Universal Machine (Duke University Press 2017, 2018) and the co-author, with Stefano Harvey, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013) and A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016).

He has published several poetry collections, including The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016), The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press 2014), and The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), which was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Reviewing Black and Blur for 4Columns, fellow poet and scholar Maggie Nelson writes "Simply put, Moten is offering up some of the most affecting, most useful, theoretical thinking that exists on the planet today.... Moten’s work makes the activities of reading and thinking feel palpably fresh, weird, and vital."

Moten is currently a professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he teaches courses in Black studies, poetics, music and critical race theory.

^{Photo credit | LaMont Hamilton}