David Waldstreicher has won the George Washington Prize, given annually to an outstanding book about the United States’ founding era, for The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence.
Waldstreicher’s book, published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a biography of Wheatley, the enslaved poet who was emancipated shortly after the publication of her collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.
A critic for Kirkus wrote of Waldstreicher’s biography, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, “Wheatley’s poetry comes into sharper focus, but Wheatley herself remains elusive.”
James Basker, the president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which co-sponsors the prize, said in a statement, “David Waldstreicher’s biography of Wheatley will be the definitive biography for years to come. Deeply researched, rich with historical and literary detail, with subtle readings of her poems and their classical antecedents, Waldstreicher gives us a Wheatley who is not only ‘the mother of African American literature,’ but a serious actor in the politics and religious life of the American founding.”
The George Washington Prize, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute, Washington College, and Mount Vernon, was established in 2005. Previous winners have included Ron Chernow for Alexander Hamilton, Annette Gordon-Reed for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, and Mary Beth Norton for 1774: The Long Year of Revolution.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
