Nicholas Boggs
Assistant Professor
Humanities 2095
(photo credit: Noah Loof)
Nicholas Boggs is the author of the New York Times bestselling biography, BALDWIN: A Love Story (FSG, 2025), winner of the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Phi
Beta Kappa/Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism, the Truman Capote Award for
Literary Criticism, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the Stonewall/Israel
Fishman Nonfiction Award, the Randy Shilts Nonfiction Award, and the American Book
Award. It was named a Top Ten Book of 2025 by Time magazine and The Atlantic, and
a New York Times Notable Book of the year, and it was shortlisted for the Baillie
Gifford Prize (UK). In addition, it was recognized with an Audie Award for Best Audiobook
in History/Biography. It has been optioned for film by Anonymous Content, who will
co-produce with Barack and Michele Obama's Higher Ground. Boggs is currently co-writing
the screenplay with his partner, Marlon James, and both will executive produce. Also
the co-editor of Baldwin's collaboration with French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (Duke, 2018), Boggs' scholarly writing appears in Callaloo: A Journal of African
Diaspora Arts and Letters and in the anthologies The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now (NYU), and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (Duke). His work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the National Humanities Center, the Gilder Lehrman Center and Beinecke Library at
Yale, the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, as well as a 2023 Whiting Creative
Nonfiction Grant and residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. Educated at Yale (BA), American
University (MFA), and Columbia (PhD), he lives in New York City.