Colson Whitehead: The COLOSSUS of New York

Colson Whitehead. In the literary world, his name alone creates a stir-Pulitzer Prize nominee, critically acclaimed novelist, and now a MacArthur Foundation Genius Fellow-all before his thirty-third birthday. And for the next year, Colson Whitehead shares his experiences as a novelist and leads fiction workshops in UH's nationally ranked (number two) Creative Writing Program. Is he surprised by his recent success? "Yes. As a writer, you work in such isolation, and you create something that goes out into the world and to have people like it and then really like it... It's very outstanding," Whitehead says. And his feelings since being named a MacArthur Fellow? "Shocked... you want to believe it's a hoax... it's so over the top, but it's exhilarating." Whitehead is one of three professors in the university's Creative Writing Program to have won this prestigious distinction. He keeps company with such UH notables as Richard Howard, the 1970 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and Edward Hirsch, a poet and scholar who was recently named president of the Guggenheim Foundation. Described by the MacArthur Foundation as "a bold experimental writer whose social and philosophical themes speak to the heart of American society," Whitehead was selected as one of twenty-four "genius grant" recipients who will receive a $500,000 stipend with "no strings attached" over the next five years. The MacArthur Foundation awards unrestricted fellowships to individuals who have shown "extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits." This spring is not the first time Whitehead has participated in UHıs writing program as a visiting professor-he taught a four-week fiction workshop in spring 2001. "I've discovered that the students here are very smart, and it is great to revisit books that had an influence on me and try to translate my feelings about them into something that will be useful to my students," he says. "Each student is different, and even though I can't contain and control the experience, I can dictate what the students get out of it."

Whitehead's transition from a freelance television critic for The Village Voice to a novelist was a five-year process in which he built his confidence and made his fiction writing a priority. And in 1999, the Harvard graduate made his entrance, at the age of twenty nine, into the world of fiction with his first novel, The Intuitionist. The novel is a tale of an elevator inspector-cum-detective working in a retro future set in a Gothic-like metropolis. In 2001, his second novel, John Henry Days, drew parallels between the Industrial Age and the publicity-driven Digital Age by juxtaposing the legend of the black folk hero John Henry against the life of a freelance Internet journalist. Whitehead has been quoted as describing John Henry as "the first black superhero I ever knew."

His writing has been described as ingenious, magical, groundbreaking, and starkly original, but for Whitehead, "I just hope to entertain, horrify, and delight."

With all the recent success and numerous accolades, one of Whitehead's personal achievements of last year was completing his book of essays, The Colossus of New York, which the Manhattan native describes as "short slices of life-impressionistic essays about famous New York places-my take of some of the nice and horrible bits of New York." The other was quitting smoking. Presently, Whitehead is working on his third novel... about band-aids.

"You feel like he could write about anything," says Motherless Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem in New York Magazine. "It's encouraging to see him biting off larger chunks of the world."

And where does he see himself in the next five years? "Probably writing in a slightly better office... picking up strange things and putting them on paper."


-- Sheryl Taylor