About

Wendy S. Walters is a Creative Capital Awardee in literary nonfiction and the author of a book of prose, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal (Sarabande Books, 2015), named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed, Flavorwire, Literary Hub, The Root, Huffington Post, and others. She is also the author of two books of poems, Troy, Michigan (Futurepoem, 2014) and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me. Her work has been published in BOMB, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, Full Bleed, and Harper’s among many others. Her current projects address intersections between writing and design, climate change and its reverberations, class and racial disquietude in the industrial Midwest, and organic forms in the essay.

A recipient of fellowships from NYFA, the Ford Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institute, she has a broad history of engagements with writing in and about performative contexts. She was artist-in-residence at BRIClab in Brooklyn, and her lyrical work has been performed widely, including at Carnegie Hall, Joe’s Pub, Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst in Denmark, The Institute for Advanced Study, and the Pittsburgh Symphony. In a sustained collaboration with Elyse Nelson, Walters co-curated the exhibition, Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, at The Met, on view from March 10, 2022 to March 5, 2023. It is the first exhibition at The Met to examine Western sculpture in relation to the histories of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and empire. Together they have edited a collection of essays as a companion to the show, titled Fictions of Emancipation: Reconsidering Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! (The Met/Yale University Press).

Walters is Associate Professor of Nonfiction in the Writing Program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

She holds a MFA/PHD in Poetry and Literature from Cornell University. She is the former Associate Dean of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons, The New School and former Director of the Nonfiction Concentration in in the Writing Program, Columbia. 

She was born in Michigan, and lives in New York City with her husband, the writer Dan Charnas, and their son. She is completing a book about paint and is represented by Jim Rutman of Sterling Lord Literistic.

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