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.
4 Books Honored by the Hurston/Wright Foundation in 2002
Gabriel’s Story
Read Our Review of Gabriel’s Story
David Anthony Durham makes his literary debut with a haunting novel which, in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy s All the Pretty Horses, views the American West through a refreshingly original lens.
Set in the 1870s, the novel tells the tale of Gabriel Lynch, an African American youth who settles with his family in the plains of Kansas. Dissatisfied with the drudgery of homesteading and growing increasingly disconnected from his family, Gabriel forsakes the farm for a life of higher adventure. Thus begins a forbidding trek into a terrain of austere beauty, a journey begun in hope, but soon laced with danger and propelled by a cast of brutal characters.
Durham s accomplishment is not solely in telling one man s story. He also gives voice to a population seldom included in our Western lore and crafts a new poetry of the American landscape. Gabriel s Story is an important addition to the mosaic of our nation s mythology.
Erasure
7-time BLK Bestseller, Adult Fiction (Paperback)
- A 2025 Top 50 BLK Bestseller – Adult Fiction (Paperback)
- A 2024 Top 50 BLK Bestseller – Adult Fiction (Paperback)
- NYT Best Book of the 21st Century
- 2002 BCALA Literary Award
- Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Honored Book 2002
Read Our Review of Erasure
Erasure by Percival Everett is the first great manifesto for literature by African Americans in the 21st century ▶
Percival Everett s blistering satire about race and writing, available again in paperback.
Thelonious Monk Ellison s writing career is in a slump: despite critical acclaim for his previous works, his newest manuscript has been turned down by seventeen publishers. This rejection is all the more painful as he watches the soaring success of We s Lives in Da Ghetto, a debut novel by a writer whose only connection to Harlem is a brief visit to some relatives. Concurrently, Monk confronts real-life family crises: his elderly mother is rapidly deteriorating due to Alzheimer s, and the echo of his father s suicide seven years earlier still haunts him.
In a mix of frustration and desolation, Monk hastily writes a book intended as a rebuke to Juanita Mae Jenkins s bestselling work. Though Monk never intended for My Pafology to be published much less taken seriously it is, under the pen name Stagg R. Leigh. To his shock, it becomes a literary sensation. The narrative then focuses on how Monk navigates the unexpected repercussions, both personal and professional, of his unintentional success, making this novel both uproariously funny and profoundly poignant.
In the Shadow of a Saint: A Son’s Journey to Understand His Father’s Legacy
by Ken Wiwa
Read Our Review of In the Shadow of a Saint: A Son’s Journey to Understand His Father’s Legacy
In late 1995, the little-known Ogoni region in Nigeria became a fable for our times. Ken Saro-Wiwa, a renowned poet and environmentalist, was campaigning to protect his Ogoni people against the encroachments of Shell Oil and a brutal dictatorship. He was imprisoned, tortured, brought to trial on trumped-up charges, and executed.
At the heart of the public campaign to save Ken Saro-Wiwa was another Ken Wiwa the author s son who travelled the world lobbying world leaders and mobilizing public opinion, so that his father was recognized as a hero and a symbol of the struggle for environmental justice. The Saro-Wiwa name became global currency for righteousness.
Ken Wiwa has embarked on a book that tells the story from a human, anecdotal perspective of what it means to grow up as a child in the shadow of such extraordinary men and women. In the end, it s about Ken s attempts to make peace with himself and his father following his journey as he reaches toward a final rendezvous with the father who was snatched by the hangman.
Fifth Born: A Novel
Read Our Review of Fifth Born: A Novel
When Odessa Blackburn is three years old, she sees her grandmother for the last time, and so begins her story as the fifth born of eight children in a troubled family. Molested by her father, Odessa is also the sole witness to a murder he commits. Her mother guards both secrets and joins her husband in ostracizing their fifth born from the rest of her siblings. As Odessa grows, so do her troubles. She ultimately separates herself from her parents and siblings into a new reality that prompts memory and revelation. Her choices for survival provoke an outcome that will forever alter the carefully maintained lies of her childhood. Zelda Lockhart s Fifth Born is lyrically written, poignant and powerful in its exploration of how secrets can tear families apart and unravel people s lives. Set in rural Mississippi and St. Louis, Missouri, "Fifth Born" is a story of loss and redemption, as Odessa walks away from those who she believes to be her kin to discover the meaning of family.