Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

News

A new film, "Lost Nation," which is based in part on Gretchen's research into the lives of Abijah and Lucy Prince, will premiere in Brattleboro, VT, in July. The film explores the stories of Ethan Allen and poet and activist Lucy Terry Prince, whose poem, "Bars Fight," is the first known work of African-American literature.

Gretchen has been awarded a Harvard Radcliff Institute Fellowship in the the humanities. She is the 2023-24 Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow.
Gretchen has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2023 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in the category of "Intellectual and Cultural History." (Full story)
Gretchen will be speaking about her research and writing on the life of Abijah Prince, "Abijah Prince: From Enslaved to Entrepreneur," as part of Northfield, Massachusetts' 350th anniversary.
Gretchen has been awarded the Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowhip award. Conti Fellows are chosen based on their record of outstanding accomplishments in research and creative activity and on their potential for continued excellence, particularly regarding the project that would be undertaken during the Fellowship period.

Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History will be published on 29 September in the UK.

An updated edition of the book Black London: Life Before Emancipation/Black England will be published in September in the UK by John Murray Publishers under the new title Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History, with a foreword by Zadie Smith. Smith has written about her experience of reading Black England in the 1990s in a recent essay for The Guardian.

Mr. and Mrs. Prince was nominated for a 2009 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award by the Hurston/Wright Foundation, as well as a Richard O. Hathaway Award from the Vermont Historical Society.

Gretchen appeared on Vermont Public Radio with commentary entitled, "Easter bonnets and Aretha's hat" Read and listen

Gretchen appeared on Vermont Public Radio with commentary entitled, "Thoughts on Being Bi-Racial." Read and listen

Gretchen appeared on NPR's All Things Considered "You Must Read This" installment, discussing Ann Petry's novel The Street. Listen to, "An Unflinching 'Street' View of the American Dream"

Mr. and Mrs. Prince has been nominated for a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Gretchen appeared on "complementingVIEWS" with C. Adrienne Rhodes, Carib World Radio (February 15).
"All Americans Share a Complex Racial Past," National Public Radio's All Things Considered (February 6) Listen

Interview on Vermont Public Radio with Jane Lindholm, Slavery in 18th century New England (January 29) Listen