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Hilton Als (born 1960) is an American writer and theater critic. He is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Hilton Als faculty page, Department of English, UC Berkeley. an associate professor of writing at Columbia University Hilton Als faculty page, Columbia University School of the Arts. and a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker. He is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and former editor-at-large at Vibe magazine.
In June 2020, Als was named an inaugural Presidential Visiting Scholar at Princeton University for the 2020–2021 academic year.
His 1996 book The Women focuses on his mother (who raised him in Brooklyn), Dorothy Dean, and Owen Dodson, who was a mentor and lover of Als. In the book, Als explores his identification of the confluence of his ethnicity, gender and sexuality, moving from identifying as a "Negress" and then an "Auntie Man", a Barbados term for homosexuals. His 2013 book White Girls continued to explore race, gender, identity in a series of essays about everything from the AIDS epidemic to Richard Pryor's life and work.
Als received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2000 for creative writing and the 2002–03 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.. In 2004 he won the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, which provided him half a year of free working and studying in Berlin. In addition to Columbia, he has taught at Smith College, Wellesley College, Wesleyan University, and Yale University, and his work has also appeared in The Nation, The Believer, and the New York Review of Books.
In 2017, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism: "For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race." "The 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Criticism | Hilton Als of The New Yorker", The Pulitzer Prizes. The Guardian wrote about him a year later: "Since winning his Pulitzer prize for criticism, Hilton Als has risen more visibly to the role of public intellectual, one that he plays particularly well."
As an art curator, Als has been responsible for exhibitions including the group show Forces in Nature (featuring work by such artists as Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Peter Doig, Chris Ofili, Celia Paul, Tal R, Sarah Sze, Kara Walker, and Francesca Woodman) in 2015, "Forces in Nature: Curated by Hilton Als | 13 October – 14 November 2015", Victoria Miro Gallery II. and an exhibition of work from the Manhattan years of portraitist Alice Neel, entitled Alice Neel, Uptown, at David Zwirner Gallery in New York City and Victoria Miro Gallery in London (May 18 – July 29, 2017). "Alice Neel, Uptown", Victoria Miro. "Alice Neel, Uptown curated by Hilton Als, David Zwirner, 2017. In 2024, Als guest curated This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance, at the National Portrait Gallery; the exhibit includes works of by Beauford Delaney, Bernard Gotfryd, and Faith Ringgold among others.
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