Belle Boggs, 2024–25 | National Humanities Center

Belle Boggs (NHC Fellow, 2024–25)

Project Title

Big Yellow Bus: The Essential American History of a Disappearing Public Good

Founders’ Fellowship, 2024–25

Professor of English, North Carolina State University

Belle Boggs is the author of The Gulf: A Novel; The Art of Waiting; and Mattaponi Queen: Stories. The Gulf was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize and longlisted for the Crook’s Corner prize. The Art of Waiting was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and was named a best book of the year by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, the Globe and Mail, Buzzfeed, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Mattaponi Queen, a collection of linked stories set along Virginia’s Mattaponi River, won the Bakeless Prize and the Library of Virginia Literary Award and was a finalist for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, newyorker.com, The Atlantic, Orion, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Ecotone, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.

Boggs is professor of English at North Carolina State University, where she directed the MFA program in creative writing for six years, and she writes and edits the Frog Trouble Times, a Substack about parenthood and childhood during climate change, with her daughters, Beatrice and Harriet. Her next two books are Plant Pets: 27 Cool Houseplants to Grow and Love (with Beatrice Allen) and History’s Outlaws: One Town’s Legacy, from Reconstruction through Black Lives Matter (with Sylvester Allen, Jr.).

Selected Publications

Situated Listening

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