Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University, is the author of books of history including the New York Times bestseller The History of White People; Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol; and the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007, she has received honorary degrees from Yale, Wesleyan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Dartmouth. After earning a PhD in history from Harvard, she also completed degrees in painting from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers and the Rhode Island School of Design.
In rare fashion, Dr. Nell Irvin Painter is both the Great Lakes African American Writers Conference (GLAAWC) 2026 Alice Dunbar Nelson Lifetime Achievement Winner as well as the 2026 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Lifetime Achievement Winner. Attendees of the free Great Lakes African American Writers Conference (GLAAWC) can enjoy Nell Irvin Painter’s Alice Dunbar Nelson award ceremony on Saturday, Sept. 5 from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. at the MLK Branch of the Cleveland Public Library, 10601 Euclid Ave, Cleveland, OH 44106
1. You are coming to Cleveland this September to receive two very different—but deeply complementary—lifetime achievement honors: the GLAAWC Alice Dunbar-Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award. When you look back across your work as a historian, writer, and artist, what do you hope your work has made possible for the generations coming after you?
It’s hard for me to look backwards across my work, because here at the end of August 2026, I’m still doing my work my way, writing and drawing with readers and viewers in mind, but as collaborators rather than successors. As I’m writing Sojourner Truth Was A New Yorker, and She Didn’t Say That, I’ve been inserting my own work (images as well as words) and my own experiences, but not as possible influences on my readers. More as means of welcoming them into my life and Sojourner Truth’s life, as means of bringing us all together. I hope they would embrace what happened in the past as what happened in the past, and also seeing how we, today, constantly re-interpret that past in light of our own times.
I’ve sometimes said that I’m the wrong kind of Black person, and when I see depictions of what Black people are like, I don’t measure up, certainly not in terms of racial authenticity. This is to say that I don’t feel qualified to wish stipulate what subsequent generations take from what I write and draw. I just wish people to read/see my work and recognize the care that I have put into it.
2. So much of your scholarship has involved challenging the stories Americans tell about themselves—particularly stories about race, identity, and power. What do you believe Americans most urgently need to unlearn about their history right now?
I’d like my fellow-sister citizens to understand that history isn’t some rock situated unchangeably back there. Sure, basic facts like dates and places of birth and death aren’t likely to change. But the meaning we make about what’s important in what happened in the past changes according to who “we” are and what we consider “important.” One hundred years ago the “we” of Americans who wrote about Reconstruction were privileged, conservative, White men. This was even before W. E. B. Du Bois’s magisterial Black Reconstruction. Between one hundred years ago and now the civil rights revolution and affirmative action in academia enlarged the “we.” And “we” asked, answered, and published additional answers regarding what qualified as “important.”
As for unlearning, please unlearn the demeaning (to historians of all races and genders) that history and “the archive” have nothing to offer Black Americans. Black historians and our allies have been writing and publishing history for well over a century, so there’s no need for “wake work” about history. Rather than bemoaning what seems not to be there, let us read the work that already exists in print and images. And there’s no such thing as “the archive.” Historical archives are living things that grow bigger with every bit of research and all the new questions we ask. I don’t use “the archive” in the singular, preferring to speak of “archives” in the plural. Those archives, those historical resources, are infinitely richer than when I was a graduate student in the 1970s.
3. You have written extensively about Sojourner Truth, and you are now working on a new book that promises to revisit her life and some of the things that have been attributed to her. What happens to a historical figure when the person becomes an icon? And what do we lose when the complexity of a real human being is replaced by the version of that person we find most useful?
The process of icon-making is, of necessity, one of flattening, of simplifying. In terms of Sojourner Truth, flattening her into a phrase—that she did not utter and that has been southernized—cheats us of access to an amazing life that can be even more inspiring than the widely evoked stereotype. Just three examples: Sojourner Truth was a self-published author who can inspire other self-published authors. Sojourner Truth used recent technologies (stereotype printing plates and caret-de-visite photography) to shape her representations in public. I call that “self-fashioning.” And Sojourner Truth was a knitter who can inspire knitters of all background as a hero proud of our craft.
4. In Old in Art School, you described the remarkable decision to return to school in your sixties to study painting. What did becoming a painter teach you about history—and what did being a historian teach you about making art—that you could not have learned by remaining within either discipline alone?
The first thing art school did for me was teach me the difference between discursive meaning—what comes through text and speech—and visual meaning, which comes through images and sight. This is also a difference that helps understand the contrast between history and art. Even between nonfiction and fiction. Not being tethered to archival facts, artists can make things up. And their art can inspire historians to bring new, unforeseen questions into their archives and even unearth new historical facts. I appreciate the valuable roles of history and of art. We need both. But they aren’t the same thing, and that needs to remain clear.
5. You have demonstrated that reinvention does not have to be a young person’s game. What would you say to someone who believes they have missed their opportunity to become the person—or the artist, writer, scholar, or citizen—they imagined themselves becoming?
My dear mother Dona Irvin taught me the possibility of beginning again at sixty-five. She also taught me the value of ourselves as individuals, not just as units of sex-race: we are interesting in and of ourselves and our own experiences. I urge my fellow Old People (in art, anybody over thirty-two) to embrace one of the great offerings of American life: the ability to do something new, to start over. I urge those wanting something new to try as many things out as they want through classes in local community colleges and night schools. The internet also offers a good deal of instruction right at home through your phone or laptop.
But two cautions: keep material conditions in mind. First, make sure your familial responsibilities are taken care of—your children, your spouse, your parents. Second, check your finances, especially if you want to go to art school, which is expensive without leading to a paying career. And, last, be realistic about your own body. I was strong and resilient in my sixties, able to commute to New York City and New Brunswick, New Jersey, from Newark and stand up for hours to paint. But I couldn’t do that physically now, in my eighties. I still write and make art, but I know better than to entertain dreams of fame as an international artist.
6. You are being honored twice in Cleveland this September—by GLAAWC and by the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Cleveland has a remarkable tradition of using literature and the humanities to ask difficult questions about race, history, identity, and American life. What does it mean to you to receive these honors in this particular city and within this particular literary community?
I’m just so pleased and grateful and honored for recognition from GLAAWC and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Thank you. This will not be my first time in Cleveland as an artist. But this time, for GLAAWC, I thank my former Newark colleague, Jeremy Johnson, erstwhile director of Newark Arts. For Anisfield-Wolf, I’m grateful at the least to Natasha Trethewey and Tiya Miles, who were already familiar with my work. All three of these comrades have labored with me in the vineyards of race, history, identity, and American life for many years. I thank them and also my supporters whom I don’t know personally.