Tope Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC. He serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards.

His reviews, essays and cultural criticism have been featured in The Atlantic, The Baffler, BBC, The Drift, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Vulture, The Washington Post and elsewhere.

Tope serves as a board member of the Avalon Theater in Washington DC, the Vice President of the Board of the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, and as a member of the President’s Council of Pathfinder. He also serves as an advisor to Maps to the Next World, an initiative of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Arts and Poetry Magazine to chart new paths forward for the literary arts.

He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Master’s degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.