Elinor Langer

Elinor Langer’s most recent publication is a Special Issue of The Nation on Hawaiian history titled “Famous are the Flowers: Hawaiian Resistance Then—and Now," which appeared in 2008. Her book about the 1988 skinhead killing of an Ethiopian man in Portland, Oregon, entitled A Hundred Little Hitlers, was chosen as a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award for work-in-progress and was also a finalist for both the Book-of-the-Month Club’s Best Non-Fiction Book and the PEN-USA Best Research-Based Non-Fiction Book that year. A longstanding member of The Nation editorial board, she has appeared in such publications as The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Science, and Mother Jones, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Open Society Institute.

Ms. Langer has taught at Goddard, Reed, Portland State University, and elsewhere, and is currently on the faculty of the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA program. The work supported by the Guggenheim Foundation was her biography of the American radical novelist and journalist Josephine Herbst, which was nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1984. She is now at work on a portrait of the last ruler of the independent Kingdom of Hawaii, Queen Lili’uokalani, that combines her love of biography with her love of Hawaiian history; it is scheduled to be published by Holt in 2012.