Tope Folarin

Tope Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington, D.C. He serves as director of the Institute for Policy Studies, and is the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. His reviews, essays and cultural criticism have been featured in The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Vulture, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.

Folarin serves as a board member for the Avalon Theater in Washington D.C., and the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, and as a member of the President’s Council of Pathfinder International. In addition, he is the Bauder Writer-in-Residence in Howard County, Maryland, for the 2024-25 school year.

He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Masters’ degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2019.

Author photo: Beowulf Sheehan