Kristen Radtke (MFA '12) awarded a 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant

$40,000 grant for "completing a book of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction"
Sunday, October 6, 2019

Radtke (MFA '12) awarded a 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction GrantKristen Radtke, a 2012 graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, has won the 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant.

Given annually by the Whiting Foundation to just a handful of nonfiction writers, the grant awards $40,000 to a writer "in the process of completing a book of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction."

In Radtke's case, that project is Seek You: Essays on American Loneliness, to be published by Pantheon Books. The graphic nonfiction work uses text and image to delve into loneliness from a variety of social and cultural perspectives.

Radtke is the author of Imagine Wanting Only This (2017), which—among other honors and many critical raves—was named Best Nonfiction Book of 2017 by Nylon, Electric Literature, and Kirkus Reviews, and Best Graphic Novel of 2017 by Forbes, Entertainment Weekly, Booklist, and Barnes & Noble.

In addition to Seek You, Radtke is working on a graphic novel, Terrible Men, also slated to be published by Pantheon. She is the art director and deputy publisher of The Believer magazine, published at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. Her writing and illustrations have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, The Guardian, GQ, New Yorker’s “Page Turner” and “Daily Shouts,” Oxford American, and many other places.

The MFA in Nonfiction Writing Program is a program of the University of Iowa Department of English. In addition to offering a full range of graduate courses in literary nonfiction, the program awards the annual Krause Essay Prize.

The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.