R.A. Judy earned the 2023 Truman Capote Literary Trust Award

R.A. Judy, a professor of critical and cultural studies at the University of Pittsburgh, has been chosen as the 2023 recipient of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Award for Literary Criticism.

Judy — who teaches comparative literature, Black critique and world literature at Pitt — was selected for the $30,000 prize for his book “Sentient Flesh.” He has also authored many essays as well as the 1992 book “(Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative.”

The selection committee spoke highly of Judy: “His work as a philosopher, a literary and cultural critic, a teacher, an editor, and a colleague is a unique and emphatic announcement of what a certain fundamental strain of and in black studies has long been — namely the irruptive, disruptive turning and overturning of the ontological, metaphysical and epistemological foundations of modernity.”

Created in 1994, The Truman Capote Literary Trust Award is administered by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on behalf of the estate of Truman Capote. Judy officially accepted the award and gave remarks at an Oct. 4 ceremony at the Old Capitol Museum in Iowa City.