Gray and Price receive Boydston prize for essay on editing Whitman

Nicole Gray and Kenneth M. Price

July 2, 2018

The Association for Documentary Editing (ADE) has awarded the 2018 Boydston Essay Prize to Nicole Gray and Kenneth M. Price. The prize is presented biennually for the best essay or review (published during the previous two years) that focuses on the editing of a volume or works. Their winning essay, “The Letters in the Litter: Messy Boundaries and Other Conundrums in Editing Walt Whitman's Correspondence,” appeared in the 2016 issue of Scholarly Editing. The pair received an honorarium and were honored at the annual meeting of the ADE in June.

Hillegass University Professor of American Literature Kenneth M. Price is co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive and co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the co-editor of books on Literary Studies in the Digital Age, James Weldon Johnson, George Santayana, and nineteenth-century periodical literature. He is also the co-editor of Dear Brother Walt: The Letters of Thomas Jefferson Whitman (Kent State, 1984); editor of Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge, 1996); author of Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (Yale, 1990) and To Walt Whitman, America (North Carolina, 2004). In addition, Price co-edited with Susan Belasco and Ed Folsom Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays (Nebraska, 2007), and co-authored with Ed Folsom Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work (Blackwell, 2005).

Research Assistant Professor Nicole Gray is a project manager and associate editor of the Walt Whitman Archive. She has edited or co-edited a range of Whitman materials for the Whitman Archive, from early prose manuscripts to periodical fiction. Her primary research interests are nineteenth-century literature, editorial theory, and book history. She has published essays in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and PMLA.

The Association for Documentary Editing promotes documentary editing through the cooperation and exchange of ideas among the community of editors. The organization serves as a forum for exchanging ideas and setting standards related to transcription, editorial method, and conceptual indexing. The Boydston Essay Prize was established by Jo Ann Boydston 1995 and is among a number of awards presented annually, biennially or triennially by the ADE.