Fellowship / Fellows

Kaitlyn Greenidge

  • 2018–2019
  • Fiction & Poetry
  • Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow
  • Syracuse University
Headshot of Kaitlyn Greenidge
Photo Courtesy of Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Kaitlyn Greenidge is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her work is concerned with the ways in which history and memory influence people’s everyday lives. Her debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books, 2016), was an exploration of the legacy of the American eugenics movement as well as a meditation on language, family, and race.

During this fellowship, Greenidge is working on an untitled novel based in part on the life of Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first black female doctor in New York State. The novel is concerned with the questions of motherhood, mental illness, romantic love, and black liberation along with the question of healing practices and Haitian Vodou.

Greenidge holds an MFA from Hunter College. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her novel was a New York Times critic’s choice for 2016 and a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and on the short list for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Her nonfiction work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Elle.com, Vogue, and the Wall Street Journal. She is a contributing editor at Lenny Letter and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.

Excellence Runs in the Family. Her Novel’s Heroine Wants Something Else. (New York Times, 3/21/21)

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

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