Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominees and Winning Books
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Introduced in 2001 The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award was the first national award presented to Black writers by a national organization of Black writers. In tribute to Zora Neale Hurston, the Foundation has renamed the awards for each category for Fiction, Nonfiction, Debut Fiction, and Poetry – The Zora. These awards are presented at the annual The Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards.
Each October, the award winners are celebrated during the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards that draws hundreds of literary stars, readers, representatives of the publishing industry, the arts, media, politics, and academia. Learn more at the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s website.
3 Books Honored by the Hurston/Wright Foundation in 2009
Winner – Fiction
Say You’re One Of Them
by Uwem Akpan
List Price: $14.99
Back Bay Books (Sep 18, 2009)
Fiction, Paperback, 384 pages
ISBN: 9780316086370Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Book Description:
Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.
A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday. A Rwandan girl relates her family s struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. A young brother and sister cope with their uncle s attempt to sell them into slavery. Aboard a bus filled with refugees a microcosm of today s Africa a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria. Through the eyes of childhood friends the emotional toll of religious conflict in Ethiopia becomes viscerally clear.
Uwem Akpan s debut signals the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer who gives a matter-of-fact reality to the most extreme circumstances in stories that are nothing short of transcendent.
Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.
A family living in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya scurries to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday. A Rwandan girl relates her family s struggles to maintain a facade of normalcy amid unspeakable acts. A young brother and sister cope with their uncle s attempt to sell them into slavery. Aboard a bus filled with refugees a microcosm of today s Africa a Muslim boy summons his faith to bear a treacherous ride across Nigeria. Through the eyes of childhood friends the emotional toll of religious conflict in Ethiopia becomes viscerally clear.
Uwem Akpan s debut signals the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer who gives a matter-of-fact reality to the most extreme circumstances in stories that are nothing short of transcendent.
Winner – Nonfiction
Incognegro: A Memoir Of Exile And Apartheid
List Price: $18.00
South End Press (Aug 01, 2008)
Nonfiction, Paperback, 500 pages
ISBN: 9780896087835Publisher: South End Press
Book Description:
[Frank B.] Wilderson [will] become a major American writer. Mark my word. Ishmael ReedIn 1995, a South African journalist informed Frank B. Wilderson, one of only two American members of the African National Congress (ANC), that President Nelson Mandela considered him a threat to national security. Wilderson was asked to comment. Incognegro is that comment. It is also his response to a question posed five years later by a student in a California university classroom: How come you came back? Although Wilderson recollects his turbulent life as an expatriate in South Africa during the furious last gasps of apartheid, Incognegro is at heart a quintessentially American story. During South Africa s transition, Wilderson taught at universities in Johannesburg and Soweto by day. By night, he helped the ANC coordinate clandestine propaganda, launch psychological warfare, and more. In his mesmerizing political memoir, Wilderson s lyrical prose flows from his childhood in the white Minneapolis enclave integrated by his family to a rebellious adolescence at the student barricades in Berkeley and under tutelage of the Black Panther Party; from unspeakable dilemmas in the red dust and ruin of South Africa to his return to political battles raging quietly on US campuses and in his intimate life. Readers will find themselves suddenly overtaken by the subtle but resolute force of Wilderson s biting wit, rare vulnerability, and insistence on bearing witness to history no matter the cost.A literary tour de force sure to spark fierce debate in both America and South Africa, Incognegro retells a story most Americans assume we already know, with a sometimes awful, but ultimately essential clarity about racial politics and our own lives.Frank B. Wilderson, III is the award-winning author of Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Duke UP) and the director of Reparations Now.
[Frank B.] Wilderson [will] become a major American writer. Mark my word. Ishmael ReedIn 1995, a South African journalist informed Frank B. Wilderson, one of only two American members of the African National Congress (ANC), that President Nelson Mandela considered him a threat to national security. Wilderson was asked to comment. Incognegro is that comment. It is also his response to a question posed five years later by a student in a California university classroom: How come you came back? Although Wilderson recollects his turbulent life as an expatriate in South Africa during the furious last gasps of apartheid, Incognegro is at heart a quintessentially American story. During South Africa s transition, Wilderson taught at universities in Johannesburg and Soweto by day. By night, he helped the ANC coordinate clandestine propaganda, launch psychological warfare, and more. In his mesmerizing political memoir, Wilderson s lyrical prose flows from his childhood in the white Minneapolis enclave integrated by his family to a rebellious adolescence at the student barricades in Berkeley and under tutelage of the Black Panther Party; from unspeakable dilemmas in the red dust and ruin of South Africa to his return to political battles raging quietly on US campuses and in his intimate life. Readers will find themselves suddenly overtaken by the subtle but resolute force of Wilderson s biting wit, rare vulnerability, and insistence on bearing witness to history no matter the cost.A literary tour de force sure to spark fierce debate in both America and South Africa, Incognegro retells a story most Americans assume we already know, with a sometimes awful, but ultimately essential clarity about racial politics and our own lives.Frank B. Wilderson, III is the award-winning author of Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Duke UP) and the director of Reparations Now.
Winner – Poetry
The Headless Saints (Inland Seas)
by Myronn Hardy
List Price: $14.00
New Issues Poetry & Prose (Mar 01, 2008)
Poetry, Paperback, 85 pages
ISBN: 9781930974760Publisher: New Issues Poetry & Prose
Book Description:
Poetry. African American Studies. "Myronn Hardy s THE HEADLESS SAINTS is a book comprised of lyrical epiphanies that embrace the everyday and the mythical, and there is no way to escape the full thrust of these marvelous poems. The tropical feel in THE HEADLESS SAINTS, in the pace and space of the crafted imagery, is tangible and believable" Yusef Komunyakaa. "These spare, clear-eyed verses are remarkable for the ease with which they reveal a poet of ambitious intelligence and well-honed craft. Myronn Hardy has written a collection of quietly combustible poems that remind us of just what a gifted poet s deftly judicious craft can produce in music and emotion" Kwame Dawes.
Poetry. African American Studies. "Myronn Hardy s THE HEADLESS SAINTS is a book comprised of lyrical epiphanies that embrace the everyday and the mythical, and there is no way to escape the full thrust of these marvelous poems. The tropical feel in THE HEADLESS SAINTS, in the pace and space of the crafted imagery, is tangible and believable" Yusef Komunyakaa. "These spare, clear-eyed verses are remarkable for the ease with which they reveal a poet of ambitious intelligence and well-honed craft. Myronn Hardy has written a collection of quietly combustible poems that remind us of just what a gifted poet s deftly judicious craft can produce in music and emotion" Kwame Dawes.
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