Brenda Wineapple is the best-selling author, most recently, of Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy and the Trial that Riveted a Nation— “history at its most delicious,” said The New York Times Book Review on its front cover and named a Best Book of 2024 by The New Yorker. Her other books include The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (a “landmark study”) as well as Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, both named best books of the year by The New York Times, among other publications.  

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Hawthorne: A Life won the Ambassador Award for best biography. 

A recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, two National Endowment Fellowships in the Humanities, as well as a National Endowment Public Scholars Award, she was recently a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and  an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  

She regularly contributes to major publications such as The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books and teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia University and The New School.