Hilton Als began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, writing pieces for “The Talk of the Town;” he became a staff writer in 1994, theater critic in 2002, and lead theater critic in 2012. Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. His reviews are provocative contributions to the discourse on theater, race, class, sexuality, and identity in America. His first book, The Women, was published in 1996. His book, White Girls—a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 and winner of the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction—discusses various narratives of race and gender. His most recent book, I Don’t Remember (Penguin, June 2020), is a book-length essay on his experiences in AIDS-era New York.
Als is the curator of many exhibitions including: Alice Neel, Uptown and God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City. He is curating three successive solo exhibitions at the Yale Centre for British Art, the first exhibit in 2018 featured Celia Paul, the second, in 2019, featured Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, the third will feature Peter Doig.
In 2017 Als won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the Langston Hughes Medal in 2018. He is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan University, and Smith College. He lives in New York City.