Robin Givhan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and senior critic-at-large for The Washington Post. She is one of eight writers to win the 2024 Rabkin Prize. For the first time in the prize’s history, the Rabkin Foundation commissioned portraits of the winners in the spaces where they write and conducted interviews with them about their lives and ideas. Here is Mary Louise Schumacher, a longtime journalist and the foundation’s new executive director, in conversation with Robin. It has been gently edited for length and clarity.
Mentioned in this episode:
I Just Keep Talking by Nell Irvin Painter (Knopf Doubleday, April 2024)
“America’s tents are pitched on shameful truths,” by Robin Givhan (The Washington Post, April 2024)
“The ethnicity question: New York and Europe take different line” by Robin Givhan (The New York Times, October 2002)
Freedom Monument Sculpture Park
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Bryan Stevenson
Stumbling stones
Flyboy In The Buttermilk: Essays On Contemporary America by Greg Tate (Touchstone Books, 2015)
The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life by Sarah Kaufman (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015)
“The Only One: As a black man and the creative director of Vogue, André Leon Talley is at the intersection of many worlds,” by Hilton Als (The New Yorker, October 1994)
“Virgil Abloh’s wondrous success” by Robin Givhan (The Washington Post, November 2021)
Institute of Contemporary Art
Figures of Speech by Virgil Abloh, exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2021
This episode of the Rabkin Interviews was produced by the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation based in Portland, Maine. The Rabkin Prize is awarded through a nomination process, and an independent jury selects the winners. The production team for the Rabkin Interviews includes Cindy Eggert Johnson, producer, and Johnathon Olsen, editor. Music by Ariel Shalom, Flint, ZISO, Captain Joz, and dannyminus. These interviews are accompanied by newly commissioned portraits of these writers made by Kevin J. Miyazaki in the spaces where they work.
Robin Givhan, 2024 Rabkin Prize winner