Yaa Gyasi Will Spend Next Year at the New York Public Library. What Does That Mean?
There is a reading room on the first floor of the New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, on Fifth Avenue, where the tables are long and the light falls at an angle that seems designed to slow thought down. I sat there once, years before I moved to Madrid, and understood something about what a public institution can give a writer that almost nothing else can: time, silence, and the weight of everything already written pressing on you from every floor above.
The library announced this week its new class of Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center fellows for 2026-2027. Fifteen writers, selected from more than eight hundred applicants, will spend the academic year in that building, each with a private office, access to the research collections, and a $90,000 stipend to support new work.
Among them: Yaa Gyasi, whose novel Homegoing — a multigenerational saga tracing the descendants of two sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana — remains one of the most structurally audacious debut novels of this century. Her follow-up, Transcendent Kingdom, was quieter, more inward, and no less necessary. What she is working on now is unknown, which is precisely as it should be.
The class also includes novelists Megha Majumdar and Alexander Sammartino, nonfiction writers Rebecca Donner, Rachel Monroe, and Ross Perlin, playwright Lauren Yee, and poet Nick Flynn — a cohort that suggests the fellowship committee has been reading widely and carefully. Previous Cullman fellows include Colson Whitehead, Katie Kitamura, Saidiya Hartman, and Raven Leilani; the program has a quiet record of landing writers at the right moment.
What interests me about institutional fellowships — particularly this one — is not the money, though the money matters enormously. It is the validation of the idea that writing is work that requires conditions, not just inspiration. That a novel is not conjured from pure will but from the accumulation of research, reading, silence, and structural support that most writers are expected to fabricate for themselves while also doing everything else life requires.
Nordic countries have understood this for decades. In Denmark, the government grants lifetime stipends to writers deemed of cultural significance. Norway has state-funded literary residencies in farmhouses across the country. The United States relies on private philanthropy — the Cullman Center is named after its donors — which means these opportunities are real but precarious, dependent on generosity that could shift.
Perhaps the question is not whether Yaa Gyasi will write something extraordinary in that reading room on Fifth Avenue. She almost certainly will. The question is: how many other writers could not get into that building?
