W. Paul Coates Literarian Award Acceptance Speech from the 2024 National Book Awards
by W. Paul Coates
Published: Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Watch a Video of Walter Mosleys’s Introduction and Paul Coates Acceptance Speech.

Paul Coates Acceptance Speech:

Let me begin with a bunch of thank yous and by acknowledging someone who is here tonight only in spirit, Glenn Thompson of Writers and Readers Press. Glenn was half insane and a fanatic about Black book publishing. Dan Simon, Kassahun Checole and I flew to London in 2001 to be with Glenn as he became an ancestor. His spirit and his commitment to always move Black book publishing higher is ever present and is alive in this room tonight.

Thank you Rosalyn Coates, my soulmate, lover, and wife, for always loving and supporting me.

I love Walter Mosley. His introduction means the world to me. We published Gone Fishin, an Easy Rawlings prequel, together 28 years ago, and became friends and brothers. My journey through life is better because of you, Walter Mosley.

And let me thank the National Book Foundation and its Board for this year’s celebration, and for the work you do every day to make this world livable for the entire literary community. I thank you for that work and for your acknowledgement of me.

Neil Baldwin, former director of the National Book Foundation; Brenda Green from the National Black Writers Conference; Troy Johnson of AALBC; and PGW, our distributor: thank you guys for being here lending me your support.

Black Classic Press is part of a group of old-line Black book publishers that includes Third World Press, Africa World Press, and Just Us Books. These legacy publishers are survivors from the Civil Rights and human rights battles of the sixties and seventies. Along with newer presses like Universal Write Press, we work every day to maintain and expand Black self-narrating voices.

We each have a different focus. My focus is resistive Black voices that assert and confirm the right of Black people to advocate and express themselves in a world quick to deny their humanity.

For Black people, our enslavement was what we call the Maafa, a great catastrophic event. To survive that great disaster, my ancestors had to have stories of something better; stories of the past, and stories of the future, which during the Maafa could only be expressed aspirationally.

Despite penalties of torture and death, those aspirations later found their way into print as stories about ourselves and our view of the world, from our perspective.

My ancestors understood the power in Frederick Douglass asking, “What to the slave is the 4th of July?” and Sojourner Truth asking empathically, “Ain’t I a Woman?” They cherished a fundamental right of free people everywhere: the right to speak in our own voice, and our own style—without the permission of others, especially those who sought to keep us enslaved, ban our aspirations, ban our books, and our humanity.

Using self-narrating voices in 1827, John Russworm and Samuel Cornish founded Freedom’s Journal with the declaration, “We wish to plead our own cause For too long others have spoken for us.” David Walker used that voice in 1829, and Marcus Garvey in 1919. Carter G. Woodson captured and used it in 1921 when he established The Associated Publishers to publish books written from the perspective of our self-narrating voice. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Fannie Lou Hamer were those voices when they truth told Black aspirations, sharing them with America and the world. It took me a while to figure it out, but I am a late-coming follower in that tradition.

My mission is recovery and making Black self-narrating voices known. I am not an interpreter. I prefer to let those voices speak to new generations for themselves.

I obsessively curate those voices, especially the old, forgotten, radical, and less popular ones. The more obscure they are, the more important they are in my quest. Those voices are all Black Classics to me. I publish them, knowing they are critical to fully understanding and making sense of the brightly colored mosaic that is American and world history.

If those voices are not present, the result is a drab, washed-out monotone of history. And a narration where some awful person steps up and insists that slavery was a necessary experience that taught Black people many valuable skills. I can’t let that happen.

To do this work, to be supported by my community as I have been since 1972, and to be recognized for that work tonight is humbling. It is an affirmation to me that all books, and all voices matter.

Thank you all, and thanks again to the National Book Foundation.

(Paul Coates, Troy Johnson, Dr. Brenda Greene, Rosalyn Coates, and Walter Mosley)

Photo Credits: Beowulf Sheehan (Paul on stage), Nathalie Schueller (Paul and Walter embrace), and Troy Johnson (all the others)

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