The Phillis Wheatley Book Awards
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The Phillis Wheatley Book Award winners are announced, annually, during the Harlem Book Fair. The awards honor the best in literature by authors of African descent.
The 2017 Phillis Wheatley Book Awards Winning Books
Winner – Fiction
The Loss of All Lost Things
List Price: $19.00
Elixir Press (Feb 01, 2016)
Fiction, Paperback, 216 pages
ISBN: 9781932418569Publisher: Elixir Press
Book Description:
Winner of the Chicago Public Librarys 21st Century Award.
Winner of a Royal Palm Literary Award
Winner of the Florida Authors and Publishers Association Presidents Book Award
Winner of a Silver IPPY Award
Nominee for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Fiction
Finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Fiction
Finalist for a 2017 International Latino Book Award in Most Inspirational Fiction
Finalist for the 2017 John Gardner Award in Fiction
Finalist for the 2017 Paterson Prize in Fiction
Finalist for an IndieFab Award in Short Stories
Finalist for an IndieFab Award in Literary Fiction
One of Bookriots100 Must Read Short Story Collections
Newcitys Lit50 List: Who Really Books inChicago
Fiction. Amina Gautiers THE LOSS OF ALL LOST THINGS won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award. It is a short story collection that illuminates the beauty that can be found in inconsolable loss. Gautier leads us through terrible reality but leaves us with the promise of hope and redemption. Contest judge, Phong Nguyen had this to say about it: "Literary fiction that grips us and wont let us go is notoriously rare. To offer us complex emotional experience and riveting narrative momentum, and then to leave the reader in contemplation of its sophisticated themes and subtle weave of objective correlatives that is the stuff of literary greatness, of art that demands to be read in conversation with the canonGautiers stories have you by the throat, and they surprise you with their mercy."
Winner of the Chicago Public Librarys 21st Century Award.
Winner of a Royal Palm Literary Award
Winner of the Florida Authors and Publishers Association Presidents Book Award
Winner of a Silver IPPY Award
Nominee for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Fiction
Finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Fiction
Finalist for a 2017 International Latino Book Award in Most Inspirational Fiction
Finalist for the 2017 John Gardner Award in Fiction
Finalist for the 2017 Paterson Prize in Fiction
Finalist for an IndieFab Award in Short Stories
Finalist for an IndieFab Award in Literary Fiction
One of Bookriots100 Must Read Short Story Collections
Newcitys Lit50 List: Who Really Books inChicago
Fiction. Amina Gautiers THE LOSS OF ALL LOST THINGS won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award. It is a short story collection that illuminates the beauty that can be found in inconsolable loss. Gautier leads us through terrible reality but leaves us with the promise of hope and redemption. Contest judge, Phong Nguyen had this to say about it: "Literary fiction that grips us and wont let us go is notoriously rare. To offer us complex emotional experience and riveting narrative momentum, and then to leave the reader in contemplation of its sophisticated themes and subtle weave of objective correlatives that is the stuff of literary greatness, of art that demands to be read in conversation with the canonGautiers stories have you by the throat, and they surprise you with their mercy."
Winner – First Fiction
Book of Addis: Cradled Embers
List Price: $19.00
Elixir Press (Feb 01, 2016)
Fiction, Paperback, 216 pages
ISBN: 9780692721063Publisher: Elixir Press
Book Description:
(Volume 1) In this epic tale of love, loss and the cost of liberation, Addis, a 17-year-old enslaved girl, escapes from her enslaver, the first president of a young country. On the run for her life, with unlikely friends and a nation of enemies, Addis becomes the most wanted person alive and a global symbol of hope to enslaved people longing for freedom.
(Volume 1) In this epic tale of love, loss and the cost of liberation, Addis, a 17-year-old enslaved girl, escapes from her enslaver, the first president of a young country. On the run for her life, with unlikely friends and a nation of enemies, Addis becomes the most wanted person alive and a global symbol of hope to enslaved people longing for freedom.
Winner – Nonfiction
The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire
by Karl Jacoby
List Price: $19.00
Elixir Press (Feb 01, 2016)
Fiction, Paperback, 216 pages
ISBN: 9780393239256Publisher: Elixir Press
Book Description:
A prize-winning historian tells a new story of the black experience in America through the life of a mysterious entrepreneur.To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But for all his obvious riches and his elegant appearance, Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: he was not, in fact, from Mexico at all. Rather, he had begun life as a slave named William Ellis, born on a cotton plantation in southern Texas during the waning years of King Cotton.After emancipation, Ellis, capitalizing on the Spanish he learned during his childhood along the Mexican border and his ambivalent appearance, engaged in a virtuoso act of reinvention. He crafted an alter ego, the Mexican Guillermo Eliseo, who was able to access many of the privileges denied to African Americans at the time: traveling in first-class train berths, staying in upscale hotels, and eating in the finest restaurants.Eliseos success in crossing the color line, however, brought heightened scrutiny in its wake as he became the intimate of political and business leaders on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Ellis, unlike many passers, maintained a connection to his family and to black politics that also raised awkward questions about his racial status. Yet such was Elliss skill in manipulating his eras racial codes, most of the whites he encountered continued to insist that he must be Hispanic even as Ellis became embroiled in scandals that hinted the man known as Guillermo Eliseo was not quite who he claimed to be.The Strange Career of William Ellis reads like a novel but offers fresh insights on the history of the Reconstruction era, the US-Mexico border, and the abiding riddle of race. At a moment when the United States is deepening its connections with Latin America and recognizing that race is more than simply black or white, Elliss story could not be more timely or important. 1 map; 8 pages of illustrations
A prize-winning historian tells a new story of the black experience in America through the life of a mysterious entrepreneur.To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But for all his obvious riches and his elegant appearance, Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: he was not, in fact, from Mexico at all. Rather, he had begun life as a slave named William Ellis, born on a cotton plantation in southern Texas during the waning years of King Cotton.After emancipation, Ellis, capitalizing on the Spanish he learned during his childhood along the Mexican border and his ambivalent appearance, engaged in a virtuoso act of reinvention. He crafted an alter ego, the Mexican Guillermo Eliseo, who was able to access many of the privileges denied to African Americans at the time: traveling in first-class train berths, staying in upscale hotels, and eating in the finest restaurants.Eliseos success in crossing the color line, however, brought heightened scrutiny in its wake as he became the intimate of political and business leaders on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Ellis, unlike many passers, maintained a connection to his family and to black politics that also raised awkward questions about his racial status. Yet such was Elliss skill in manipulating his eras racial codes, most of the whites he encountered continued to insist that he must be Hispanic even as Ellis became embroiled in scandals that hinted the man known as Guillermo Eliseo was not quite who he claimed to be.The Strange Career of William Ellis reads like a novel but offers fresh insights on the history of the Reconstruction era, the US-Mexico border, and the abiding riddle of race. At a moment when the United States is deepening its connections with Latin America and recognizing that race is more than simply black or white, Elliss story could not be more timely or important. 1 map; 8 pages of illustrations
Winner – Poetry
Cannibal
List Price: $19.00
Elixir Press (Feb 01, 2016)
Fiction, Paperback, 216 pages
ISBN: 9780803290631Publisher: Elixir Press
Book Description:
Winner of the 2016 Whiting AwardWinner of the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts & LettersWinner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (Poetry)An American Library Association"Notable Book of the Year"Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Open Book AwardLonglisted for the 2017 Dylan Thomas PrizeOne of BuzzFeeds Best Poetry Books of 2016One of The New Yorkers "Books We Loved in 2016"APublishers Weekly"Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2016"
Colliding with andconfrontingThe Tempestand postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya SinclairsCannibalexplore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems.
Winner of the 2016 Whiting AwardWinner of the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts & LettersWinner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (Poetry)An American Library Association"Notable Book of the Year"Longlisted for the 2017 PEN Open Book AwardLonglisted for the 2017 Dylan Thomas PrizeOne of BuzzFeeds Best Poetry Books of 2016One of The New Yorkers "Books We Loved in 2016"APublishers Weekly"Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2016"
Colliding with andconfrontingThe Tempestand postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya SinclairsCannibalexplore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems.
Hon. Men. – 1st Nonfiction
America’s Original Sin: A Collection of Essays on Racism and the Continuing Scourge of White Supremacy
List Price: $19.00
Elixir Press (Feb 01, 2016)
Fiction, Paperback, 216 pages
ISBN: 9780692624272Publisher: Elixir Press
Book Description:
CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH?
This powerful work by K. Gerald Torrence is a collection of thirty-four reflective essays that explore the gritty truth about structural racism and white privilege in America.
Torrence is interested in nothing more and nothing less than the truth. And in Americas Original Sin, he explores the painful truth about the four-hundred-year odyssey of the Negro in Americathe scourge of racism that stretches back to the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619 and continues today, insidiously, despite the election of the nations first black president.
Exposing the delusional falsehoods that keep the troubling reality of black lives hidden from view, this book speaks truth to the economic, political, and social forces that collude, with ample help from the mainstream media, to sweep the lack of progress toward freedom and equality under the rug. From cable news to professional sports to the US Justice Department and President Barack Hussein Obama himself, no one and no topic is off limits as Torrence takes readers on a fearlessly honest journey through the eyes of todays African-American.
With the naked truth exposed, Americas Original Sin ultimately issues a call to mobilize a return to the rich heritage of black America.
CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH?
This powerful work by K. Gerald Torrence is a collection of thirty-four reflective essays that explore the gritty truth about structural racism and white privilege in America.
Torrence is interested in nothing more and nothing less than the truth. And in Americas Original Sin, he explores the painful truth about the four-hundred-year odyssey of the Negro in Americathe scourge of racism that stretches back to the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619 and continues today, insidiously, despite the election of the nations first black president.
Exposing the delusional falsehoods that keep the troubling reality of black lives hidden from view, this book speaks truth to the economic, political, and social forces that collude, with ample help from the mainstream media, to sweep the lack of progress toward freedom and equality under the rug. From cable news to professional sports to the US Justice Department and President Barack Hussein Obama himself, no one and no topic is off limits as Torrence takes readers on a fearlessly honest journey through the eyes of todays African-American.
With the naked truth exposed, Americas Original Sin ultimately issues a call to mobilize a return to the rich heritage of black America.
Hon. Men. – 1st Nonfiction
White Man’s Disease
List Price: $19.00
Elixir Press (Feb 01, 2016)
Fiction, Paperback, 216 pages
ISBN: 9780692741764Publisher: Elixir Press
Book Description:
Poignant, sad, tragic, funny, and compelling. At 29, Paul Thornton was married to his beautiful childhood sweetheart, a rising star at one of the worlds largest companies, and gifted with a tall, commanding presence. But then a catastrophe left him without his wife, his career in jeopardy, and his life measured by the thin blade of a skilled surgeon. Affirmative action, corporate politics, the home media revolution, and medical ethics inform White Mans Disease, a book about one mans victory and a larger story about the power of human resilience, and the essential American Dream of realizing ones full potential. Signed
Poignant, sad, tragic, funny, and compelling. At 29, Paul Thornton was married to his beautiful childhood sweetheart, a rising star at one of the worlds largest companies, and gifted with a tall, commanding presence. But then a catastrophe left him without his wife, his career in jeopardy, and his life measured by the thin blade of a skilled surgeon. Affirmative action, corporate politics, the home media revolution, and medical ethics inform White Mans Disease, a book about one mans victory and a larger story about the power of human resilience, and the essential American Dream of realizing ones full potential. Signed