Martin Tsang

Executive Director

Martin Tsang is the Executive Director of the Whiting Foundation, which he joined in 2025 as Senior Program Officer. He previously served as Senior Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he led initiatives to preserve cultural collections and expand access to them for teaching, research, and public engagement. From 2015 to 2022, he served as the University of Miami’s inaugural Curator of Latin American Collections and Librarian for the Cuban Heritage Collection, the largest body of materials on Cuba outside the island. A scholar of 19th-century Asian migration to the Caribbean and the Americas, he holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Florida International University. He is the author of more than 35 scholarly and public-facing publications. He is a senior fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School.

Peter Godwin

Resident Director 

Peter Godwin is the Resident Director of the Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress. He was born and raised in Zimbabwe. He worked as a human rights lawyer, and as a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times (London) and the BBC. He has authored seven non-fiction books including Mukiwa, which won the George Orwell Prize and the Esquire, Apple, Waterstones award, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, which won the Borders Original Voices Award. His book, The Fear, was selected by The New Yorker, The Economist and Publishers’ Weekly as a best book of the year. A Guggenheim fellow, Godwin has taught writing at Wesleyan and Columbia, and served as President of PEN American Center. His latest book is Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars.

Adam Kirsch

Resident Director 

Adam Kirsch is the Resident Director of the Whiting Awards for Emerging Writers. He is a poet and literary critic and is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of four volumes of poetry and three collections of essays, as well as books on Jewish literature and other subjects. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, he has been an editor at The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and other publications, and has taught at Columbia University's Center for American Studies.

Adam Capitanio

Program Officer

Adam Capitanio is a Program Officer with the Whiting Foundation, overseeing the implementation of the Whiting Awards and the Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works in Progress. He is an experienced arts and humanities grant-maker, cultural programmer, and educator. Prior to joining Whiting, Adam was Director of Programs at Humanities New York, the state humanities council. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Michigan State University and degrees in Cinema Studies from New York University.

Anna Zalokostas

Program Officer

Anna Zalokostas is a Program Officer with the Whiting Foundation, overseeing the implementation of the Whiting Awards and the Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works in Progress. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University, where she researched and taught modern and contemporary American literature and served as Director of Volunteer Development for the Northwestern Prison Education Program. Before joining Whiting, she taught interdisciplinary humanities at North Carolina State University and worked in independent bookselling, small press publishing, and digital archives. Her scholarly and public-facing writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Post45, Mediations, and ASAP/Review, and in The Return of the ’90s: A Cultural History of the Present (Pluto Books, 2026). 

Gabriela Bloch

Executive Assistant

Gabriela Bloch is an Executive Assistant with the Whiting Foundation. She received her B.A. from Fordham University in 2025, where she double majored in International Relations and Classical Languages and wrote her senior thesis on the repatriation of art following World War II. Before joining Whiting, she worked at Georges Bergès Gallery, supporting curatorial projects and gallery operations, and at the Journal of the United Nations, where she served as a liaison facilitating communications between the UN Secretariat and the Permanent Missions of Member States. She is fluent in Polish, Spanish, Russian, Latin, and Ancient Greek, with proficiency in French, Italian, and Serbian, and is currently studying Arabic and Turkish. Gabriela serves as Vice President of the Bloch Family Foundation of NY which supports the restitution of Polish works of art and objects associated with Polish national heritage and culture.