Brenda Wineapple


Brenda Wineapple is an American nonfiction writer, literary critic, and essayist who has written several books on nineteenth-century American writers.

Early life and education

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she graduated from Brandeis University.

Career

In 2014, Wineapple received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her book White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and three National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. Elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is also an elected Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and was the Donald C. Gallup Fellow at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, as well as a fellow of the Indiana Institute of Arts and Letters. She serves as literary advisor for the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of America, and she is on the advisor board of Lapham's Quarterly and The American Scholar.
Wineapple currently teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia University's School of the Arts and at the New School in New York City. She was previously the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at The Graduate School, CUNY, and its Writer-in-Residence. She has also taught at Sarah Lawrence College and in the summer MFA program of Johns Hopkins University in Florence, Italy.
A regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The Nation and other national publications, she is also the editor of The Selected Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier and Nineteenth-Century American Writers on Writing.

Personal life

She is married to the composer Michael Dellaira.

Works