Amy Reading and Nicholas Boggs are this year’s winners of the Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowships. The $2,500 fellowships  are available, on a competitive basis, to BIO members with a work in progress to help fund research trips to archives and to important settings in their subject’s lives. Reading’s book is Katharine White Edits ‘The New Yorker,’ and Boggs is working on James Baldwin: In the Full Light.

Caro Fellowship Committee chair Deirdre David said, “The committee was very impressed by Amy Reading’s detailed exposition of the cultural importance of Katherine White, and by her justification of the need to travel to Maine to explore its significance in her life. We were also engaged by her emphasis on White’s influence in publishing a distinctive list of women writers whose careers, as she put it, ‘were made at The New Yorker.’”

The committee “was also impressed by Nicholas Boggs’ compelling exploration of James Baldwin’s relationships and by his justification of the need to travel to France where Baldwin spent six months in 1956,” said Caroline Fraser, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who also served on the committee, along with BIO’s treasurer, Marc Leepson.

Reading and Boggs will receive their stipends on Friday, May 17, at the evening reception preceding the annual BIO Conference in New York City. The reception will be held at the Fabbri Mansion on the Upper East Side. Robert Caro is expected to present the award.

Go here to learn more about the Caro Research/Travel Fellowship.