Vinson Cunningham
Vinson Cunningham graduated with his bachelor’s degree from Hunter College in 2014, and is now a theatre critic for The New Yorker, where he has been on staff since 2016. An English major, Cunningham credits the courses and instructors at Hunter for helping him dive deeply into subject matter and extracting the most from his studies. He has fond memories of a course in early American literature taught by Michael Seth Stewart, then a CUNY graduate student: “He was just a wonderful teacher.”
Thankful for finding a community at Hunter after his first experience at college didn’t work out as he expected, Cunningham said, “My classmates were New Yorkers, and therefore from everywhere. Everybody had at least one job, and lots of them had two or three.”
In addition to The New Yorker, Cunningham’s writing on books, art, and culture has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Times Book Review, Vulture, The Awl, The Fader, and McSweeney’s, where he wrote a column called “Field Notes From Gentrified Places.” Cunningham was a 2020 finalist for a National Magazine Award for his profile of comedian Tracy Morgan, and he also served as a staff assistant at the Obama White House.