Whiting Foundation 2024 Creative Nonfiction Grantee: Ronald Williams II
UNC Press is proud to announce that Ronald Williams II is one of the Whiting Foundation’s 2024 recipients of the $40,000 Creative Nonfiction Grant, given to writers in the process of completing a book of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction. Williams II’s BLACK EMBASSY: TransAfrica and the Struggle for Foreign Policy Justice is forthcoming from UNC Press—the only publication from a university press that is recognized in this year’s cohort.
The Whiting Foundation recognizes that these works are essential to our culture, but come into being at great cost to writers in time and resources. The grant encourages original and ambitious projects by giving recipients the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition.
The grant jury states: Ronald Williams II has crafted a definitive and surprisingly intimate guide through the lifespan of a powerful political organization that refused to accept the limited scope of American foreign policy. Written in confident, lively prose, Black Embassy does especially important work in bringing forth the crucial contributions of African Americans to ending apartheid in South Africa. There is no more knowledgeable scholar on this topic; Williams has been working on this project for almost 20 years, and it shows. This book is a well of knowledge that readers will draw from for generations.
Ronald Williams II is a historian, writer, consultant, and former professor. He has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California, Berkeley, from which he also earned a PhD in African American Studies. A native of Oakland, California, he lives in Durham, North Carolina with his daughters, Zora and Macy.