The Whiting Foundation has launched a new partnership with the Brooklyn-based literary public relations firm Press Shop PR. Announced today alongside the 10 winners of Whiting's 2025 Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress, the partnership will provide strategic publicity guidance to this year's awardees, who also receive $40,000 each to support the completion of their books, as well as all past winners of the prize, which has run annually since 2016.
The 2025 grantees are Paul Bogard, Jason Cherkis, S.C. Cornell, Caitlin Dickerson, Elena Dudum, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Will Harris, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Avi Steinberg, and Raksha Vasudevan.
“At a moment when traditional support systems for writers are eroding—publishers cutting marketing budgets, media coverage shrinking, independent bookstores struggling—we wanted to expand the kind of comprehensive support we've always believed in," said Whiting executive director Constantia Constantinou.
Constantinou said Whiting has provided publicity support to its grantees for the duration of the prize, but noted that the partnership will extend its impact. "We're investing in connecting our writers with their audiences because that's what meaningful, sustained support looks like in 2026,” Constantinou said.
The projects being written by this year's cohort of winners include a longform journalistic account of the history and sociology of suicide prevention; timely reporting on border politics and deportation; and a new biography of Grace Paley. Per the award's eligibility requirements, each title is under contract with a publisher in the U.S., U.K., or Canada.
On its website, Whiting describes the grant as a "mid-process" boost to help writers pursue the unforeseeable detours and new questions in the later stages of their reporting, when a publisher advance might have already dried up. Whiting is also known for its flagship $50,000 award for emerging writers, now in its 40th year.
With the new publicity guidance through Press Shop and its sister company Book Publicity School, Whiting is also helping the awardees look beyond publication, "empowering them to effectively promote their books and scholarship amid the shifting news and publishing landscapes," per the announcement. Both past and present recipients of the prize will have access to a six-week book publicity training program, which includes regular office hours and an online community group. Press Shop founder Leah Paulos specifically mentioned "platform development, messaging, and media outreach" as among the skills winners would hone.
Vasudevan, one of this year’s recipients and the author of the forthcoming Empires Between Us: Estrangement and Kinship Across Three Continents (Graywolf), which explores post-colonial aid work from the author’s South Asian Canadian perspective, said the training will help widen her book’s impact.
“As a nonfiction writer specifically, it's hard to know how to juggle the actual writing and research (which could easily be endless) with connecting with my audience,” she said, adding, “I hope this course will help me understand what to prioritize now (versus what I can save for later) in terms of publicity in a really fragmented—and frankly overwhelming—media market.”
