2026 Louis Auchincloss Prize

Prize Presentation & Reception Honoring Colson Whitehead

Each fall, the Museum of the City of New York presents the Louis Auchincloss Prize to writers and artists whose work is inspired by and enhances the five boroughs of New York City. On Wednesday, October 21st, the Museum will celebrate two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning author Colson Whitehead whose novels and essays have long used New York City as a lens for examining history, identity, and American life. Whitehead will receive the Prize at a public program moderated by Wesley Morris, a critic at The New York Times who writes about art and popular culture.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2026

6:30 PM: Louis Auchincloss Prize Presentation and Conversation with Colson Whitehead and Wesley Morris
8:00 PM: Reception 

About Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Cool Machine and The Underground Railroad, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the 2016 National Book Award, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. In 2020, Whitehead won a second Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Nickel Boys, making him one of only a handful of authors to win the prize twice. His other notable works include The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and the essay collection The Colossus of New York. He is also a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including The New Yorker and Harper's.

Whitehead's work crisscrosses genres—from the noir detective story of his debut novel, The Intuitionist, to the zombie thriller Zone One—but returns again and again to New York, his native city, as an anchor for grappling with universal questions and timeless themes. As he writes in The Colossus of New York: "Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world."

In spring 2019, Whitehead delivered the Museum's Robert A. and Elizabeth R. Jeffe Distinguished Lecture in Urban History, discussing his deep engagement with New York City's history across his fiction and nonfiction, in a conversation that followed with The Atlantic's Hannah Giorgis.

About the Louis Auchincloss Prize

The Louis Auchincloss Prize is presented to writers and artists whose work is inspired by and enhances the five boroughs of New York City, across disciplines including literature, architecture, art, music, playwriting, and photography. The Prize honors Louis Auchincloss (1917–2010) for his many years of service to the Museum of the City of New York, as well as for the literary contributions that established him as one of the leading American novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Auchincloss accepted the first Prize himself in 2007.

Distinguished past recipients of the Louis Auchincloss Prize include Anna Deavere Smith, Faith Ringgold, Toshiko Mori, Robert A.M. Stern, Jason Robert Brown, Gloria Steinem, Whoopi Goldberg, Michiko Kakutani, Tony Kushner, Wynton Marsalis, Philip Glass, Stephen Sondheim, Lynne Meadow, Elliott Erwitt, Pete Hamill, Sheldon Harnick, and Ada Louise Huxtable.