Humanitas A fiction prize for The Yale Review, pitching at Cannes, and a ‘curtain call’

The latest edition of Humanitas, a column focused on the arts and humanities at Yale, presents a significant award for The Yale Review, an exhibit pairing two highly significant collections of African American cultural history, Rome Prize honorees, a “monumental” article, and Yale’s resident expert on the history of opera curtains.

For more, please visit an archive of all arts and humanities coverage at Yale News.

The Yale Review takes home a top fiction prize

The Yale Review — a cultural and literary journal that has published work by leading writers, poets, and critics for more than two centuries — won the 2026 National Magazine Award for Fiction at a New York City prize ceremony on May 19. The award, given annually by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), honors magazines and websites for excellence in the publication of fiction, as demonstrated by three examples of short fiction.

The Yale Review was recognized for the stories “An Angel Passed Above Us” by Hungarian Nobel Prize-winner László Krasznahorkai (translated by John Batki), a grim tale about the war in Ukraine draped in techno-optimism; “The Rabbit’s Foot” by Sigrid Nunez, about a New York hotel worker who was found abandoned as an infant with only the titular item in her hand; and “What Are We Doing, What Have We Done” by Nathan Englander, about an expectant father’s struggle with climate anxiety. 

“Winning the ASME Award for Fiction… is a thrilling recognition of what a small, ambitious magazine can do,” said editor-in-chief Meghan O’Rourke. “The Yale Review has long believed that literary fiction is essential cultural work, not a luxury, and that conviction shows in the writers we publish: a Nobel laureate alongside two of the most distinctive American voices working today. Our editors, our student readers, and our fact-checkers have just accomplished a historic feat through sheer dedication and hard work.”

This is the second National Magazine Award for The Yale Review; it previously won the 2024 General Excellence Award in Literature, Science and Politics, and was a finalist in that category this year. Among this year’s awardees in other categories were The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and National Geographic.

Curtain call 

The New York Times recently reported on the unveiling of new stage curtains at London’s Royal Opera House and looked to Yale’s Gundula Kreuzer for some historical context. 

Kreuzer, a professor of music in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the department chair, specializes in the history and theory of opera. As the Times noted, her 2018 book, “Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera,” includes a 54-page chapter on the history of opera curtains. 

The red velvet curtains replaced at the Royal Opera House were adorned with the royal cipher of the late Queen Elizabeth II. The new curtains bear a logo designed for King Charles III. 

Curtains have hung at opera performances since the early 1600s, Kreuzer said; early on, when the show began, they either dropped to the floor or were hoisted upward, rather than parting to the sides. In the 19th century, she added, composers began incorporating instructions for the rising and falling of curtains into their scores for dramatic effect.

Black history collections in dialogue

This spring, a Yale College junior brought together two of the world’s largest and most significant collections of African American cultural history for a special event at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 

In his role as a student ambassador for The HistoryMakers, a significant archive for Black oral history, Keith Pemberton worked with staff at the Beinecke to create a one-day exhibit pairing oral histories with materials from the library’s James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection. Founded in 1941, the collection contains more than 13,000 volumes, thousands of photographs, and extensive manuscript material all related to African American history and culture. 

“The idea was to think together about what it looks like when these two collections are in dialogue, what stories become visible when you put them side by side, and what that means for how we document and access Black history going forward,” said Pemberton, a history major. 

The exhibit, “From Manuscript to Memory: African American History in the Archives,” paired about 100 manuscripts and other physical items from the Johnson collection with QR codes linked to HistoryMakers interviews. 

For example, Langston Hughes’s papers were paired with an interview with the poet Naomi Long Madgett, whose recollections of Hughes’s support of her work helps illuminate his “mentorship of a younger generation of Black women poets,” Pemberton said.

Another linkage: a rough draft of Richard Wright’s “Native Son” alongside an oral history with American diplomat Mercer Cook, who knew Wright in Paris in the late 1950s. Cook’s comments include descriptions of Wright’s complaints that he was under FBI surveillance, suspicions that were later confirmed. 

“The pairing put the novel that made Wright famous on one side, and the voice of someone who knew him in Paris when the surveillance had already started on the other,” Pemberton said.

Defining monuments

Why are some buildings considered “monumental” — and others not?

The distinction, while commonly used by anthropologists, is not so clear-cut, argues Sergio Alarcón Robledo, a postdoctoral associate and lecturer in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in a recent paper published in Antiquity.

“There is no consensus on what ‘monumental’ as a characteristic implies,” Robledo writes. “[It] does not describe an objective characteristic inherent to the building, such as a material or a color, but is instead a social construct.”

When architecture as a modern discipline was shaped, Robledo argues, architects deemed certain structures, old and new, as monumental to define a lineage “whose legitimate heirs were architects” — a tactic that conferred authority and exclusivity to their profession. 

Using the temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari as a case study, the author explores how this framework has blinded us from relevant aspects of ancient Egyptian architectural practices. Labeling such structures as “monumental,” Robledo argues, “creates a sense of comparability of buildings among populations and periods that betrays the ultimate purpose of [archaeology]: understanding the past in its own context.” 

A reporting trip with The New York Times

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has selected Brunella Tipismana Urbano ’26 as the winner of his 2026 win-a-trip contest. 

Since 2006, Kristof has selected one American college or university student each year to accompany him on a week-long excursion, all expenses paid, to a location in the United States or beyond — aiming to encourage young journalists to write about neglected topics. 

“It’s an honor to have my work recognized by a reporter whose stories I’ve read for a long time,” Tipismana Urbano said. “I’m excited to learn from Nick how to cover consequential stories with the tenacity, sensibility, and sense of scale they require.” 

Tipismana Urbano, a bilingual writer and reporter from Lima, Peru, graduated this spring from Yale with a degree in history. She served as managing editor of the Yale Daily News Magazine and editor-in-chief of Brink: A Review of Books and was a member of the Yale Journalism Initiative. She has also written for publications such as Bloomberg, El País, and The Point Magazine— and has been recognized by the Overseas Press Club, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and the Society of Professional Journalists. 

In his announcement of her win, Kristof wrote of Tipismana Urbano: “[She] has had a remarkable journey already: She grew up in Peru, taught herself English and will graduate this year from Yale with almost perfect grades while working as a student journalist, writing for Bloomberg and penning a novel.”

Yale’s “unusually strong publication culture,” Tipismana Urbano said, has given her the space to take writing seriously — and “to believe that you, too, can devote your life to this career.”

New honors from the Eternal City 

For thousands of years, the city of Rome has been an important global hub for art, architecture, and the humanities — a tradition that five members of the Yale community will help continue as recipients of 2026-27 Rome Prize and Italian Fellows Program. 

The fellowship, awarded annually to about 30 artists and scholars by the American Academy in Rome, provides a months-long work stipend and communal residence in the academy’s 11-acre Janiculum Hill campus. This year’s winners from Yale are: 

• Martin Bresnick, a professor in the practice of composition at the Yale School of Music, whose compositions include operatic and symphonic works, film scores, and computer music.
• Christopher Hawthorne, a senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture and a lecturer in the English department in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), who served for five years as the chief design officer for the city of Los Angeles.
• Amara Lakhous, a professor in the practice of Italian studies in FAS and a multilingual novelist, whose latest book, originally written in Arabic, has been translated into three other languages through a unique collaborative process.
• Tom Zhuohun Wang, a Ph.D. student in History and Classics in FAS, whose research focuses on the political economy of ancient Roman cities.
• Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra, a Ph.D. student at the Yale School of Architecture and in religious studies in FAS, who studies the spatial politics of the Catholic Church in the Asia-Pacific region.

Anthony Acciavatti, the Diana Balmori Associate Professor at the Yale School of Architecture and a 2025 fellow, recently spoke with the Academy about his experience in the program. 

A Yale student at Cannes

Each year, the Cannes Film Festival attracts the most prominent names in film to the south of France for nearly two weeks of premieres, awards, and sales. This year, Yale student Cynthia Lin was among them, pitching her short film to industry producers at the Marché du Film, the world’s largest global film marketplace. 

The film, “A Funeral Procession of Fireflies,” is a magical-realist drama set in rural Fuzhou, China in the 1990s. Drawing on her own experience as a “satellite baby” — born in the U.S. but raised in China by relatives while her parents found their footing in America — the film tells the story of two sisters who are separated when only one successfully boards a smuggler’s boat to return to their mother in the United States. 

The film incorporates folk beliefs, regional histories, and the endangered Fuzhou dialect to “tell a migration story not from the perspective of those who leave, but those who stay — children, grandmothers, those who watch the boats depart and then go on living,” said Lin. 

The project began when Lin, now a rising senior in Yale College, took an Intro to Film Writing and Directing class with Sahraa Karimi, an associate research scholar and lecturer in the film and media studies program in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She continued to develop it through further classes in filmmaking and an independent study; the project received initial funding from Yale’s Barry Fellowship, the Women Faculty Forum, Film & Media Studies Grant, and Creative and Performing Arts Award.

Lin advanced to Cannes after successfully pitching her project at the Linz International Short Film Festival 2025, where she is part of the Film Talent Academy; she hopes to expand the story into a feature film.

Lisa Prevost, Peter Cunningham, and Jessica Liu contributed to this column.