Wendy S. Walters
New York, NY
Wendy S. Walters is an author whose work blends poetry, nonfiction cultural commentary, and lyric essays to explore themes of race, gender, environment, and belonging in America. She is the author of a book of prose, Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal, named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed, Flavorwire, Literary Hub, The Root, and The Huffington Post. She is also the author of two books of poems, Troy, Michigan and Longer I Wait, More You Love Me. Walters has received fellowships from Mass MoCA, New York Foundation for the Arts, The Ford Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, The Smithsonian Institution, and Bread Loaf. She was an artist-in-residence at BRIClab in Brooklyn, where she worked on developing the book for the opera, Golden Motors with composer, Derek Bermel. Walters was a founding director of the public humanities inquiry Essay in Public, and her work has been published in The Yale Review, BOMB, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Fourth Genre, and Harper’s among many others.
Photo: Ryan Muir
2 Circles, 2 Crows (1963) from David Smith’s The White Sculptures at Storm King, 2017.
A photograph of a modern steel and glass towhouse, Modulightor House, by architect Paul Rudolph.
A photograph of white paint chips.
A photograph of a white picket fence.
The title page of an essay focused on the production of white-lead by Wendy S. Walters, featuring a painting by Robert Ryman.
A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint
Wendy S. Walters is an author whose work blends poetry, nonfiction cultural commentary, and lyric essays to explore themes of race, gender, environment, and belonging in America.
Artist BioA Dead White is a book-length polemic against the use of white paint in both interior and exterior spaces. The argument will wind through a wide selection of works in architecture, manufacturing, art history, and consumer culture, engaging narratives related to its effect in the lived environment.