David Waldstreicher Selected Winner of the 2024 George Washington Prize

Washington College joins George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in presenting one of the nation's largest literary prizes.

David Waldstreicher has been awarded the 2024 George Washington Prize for his book, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). This prestigious annual award recognizes the past year’s best works on the nation’s founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance a broad public understanding of early American history.

Created by George Washington’s Mount Vernon, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Washington College, the $50,000 George Washington Prize is one of the nation’s largest and most notable literary awards.

The 2024 winner was announced at a gala dinner held over the weekend at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home in Virginia.

Waldstreicher is a historian of early and nineteenth-century America, with a focus on political history, cultural history, slavery and antislavery, and print culture. He is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Previously, he taught at Temple University, University of Notre Dame, Yale University, and Bennington College.

Adam Goodheart, Director of Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, said, “Phillis Wheatley’s name is known to millions of people, but the details of her life and especially her work are hardly familiar except to scholars. In the pages of Waldstreicher’s lucidly written book, Wheatley’s poetry lives and speaks afresh: both as a record of her revolutionary life and as a commentary on her Revolutionary times.”

Doug Bradburn, President & CEO of Mount Vernon, said, “Phillis Wheatley was admired by George Washington, and she led an extraordinary American life. Despite enslavement to a Boston merchant family, she rose to become an unforgettable poet. Her exquisite verse was fearless in questioning issues such as slavery and discontent with British rule. David Waldstreicher’s compelling biography offers a long overdue account of Wheatley’s life and works, expanding our understanding of America’s complex history.”

James Basker, President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, said, “Phillis Wheatley burst on the scene like a starburst in the founding era, and her light is once again shining in American literature and history today. 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.”

Each year since the Prize was created in 2005, an independent jury evaluates 50 to 100 books published in the previous year that explore the history of the American founding era. The five books named finalists for the 2024 George Washington Prize are outstanding examples of robust and thought-provoking explorations of America’s unique history and include (in alphabetical order):

• Michael A. Blaakman, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
• Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023)
• Cassandra A. Good, First Family: George Washington’s Heirs and the Making of America (Toronto, ON: Hanover Square Press, 2023)
• Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023)
• David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)

More information about the George Washington Prize is available through the Starr Center's webpage.