About

Tope Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer, critic, educator, and institutional leader based in Washington, DC. He serves as Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Studies. At Georgetown University, he is the Lannan Lecturer in Creative Writing, teaches in the medical humanities, and is directing the 2027 Lannan Symposium, Human Creativity in the Age of Simulation, an interdisciplinary exploration of artificial intelligence, authorship, and human creativity. He is also a Visiting Fellow at Georgetown University in Qatar.

Folarin 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 honors. His fiction, essays, reviews, and cultural criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Drift, The Nation, The Baffler, and elsewhere. In 2025, he served as the inaugural Critic-at-Large for The Georgia Review. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.

He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two master’s degrees as a Rhodes Scholar.

Folarin serves on the boards of the Avalon Theater in Washington, DC, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, and The Phillips Collection, and as a member of the President’s Council of Pathfinder International. His work across literature, criticism, education, and public institutions explores how stories shape our understandings of identity, culture, and collective life.