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.
5 Books Honored by the Hurston/Wright Foundation in 2006
Winner – Contemporary Fiction
The Long Mile: The Shango Mysteries
List Price: $13.95
Midnight Ink (Oct 08, 2005)
Fiction, Paperback, 256 pages
ISBN: 9780738707853Publisher: Llewellyn Publications
Book Description:
Winner of the 2006 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for Best Mystery/Suspense/Thriller! This gritty detective thriller, set in New York City, relates one African-American man s riveting quest for truth and redemption.
Framed for murder during a failed drug bust, former NYPD officer John Shannon spends two years in jail before his release on appeal. Eager to find the true killer and clear his name, he enjoys two scant minutes of freedom before being brutally arrested, knocked unconscious, and whisked away to the Office of Municipal Security, run by a former CIA director. Refusing their job offer, Shannon heads home to make amends with his estranged wife and discovers terrifying news: his teenage son J. J., who has become mixed up with a drug gang, has been kidnapped. Shannon s desperate search for J. J. is complicated by a new warrant for his arrest, the mysterious murder of his former partner, and Shannon s personal struggle with anger, violence, and justice.
Written in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Walter Mosley, this is the first in a series of thrillers featuring the compelling character of John Shannon.
Click here to download Book Club Questions for The Long Mile, prepared by author Clyde W. Ford!
Winner of the 2006 Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for Best Mystery/Suspense/Thriller! This gritty detective thriller, set in New York City, relates one African-American man s riveting quest for truth and redemption.
Framed for murder during a failed drug bust, former NYPD officer John Shannon spends two years in jail before his release on appeal. Eager to find the true killer and clear his name, he enjoys two scant minutes of freedom before being brutally arrested, knocked unconscious, and whisked away to the Office of Municipal Security, run by a former CIA director. Refusing their job offer, Shannon heads home to make amends with his estranged wife and discovers terrifying news: his teenage son J. J., who has become mixed up with a drug gang, has been kidnapped. Shannon s desperate search for J. J. is complicated by a new warrant for his arrest, the mysterious murder of his former partner, and Shannon s personal struggle with anger, violence, and justice.
Written in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Walter Mosley, this is the first in a series of thrillers featuring the compelling character of John Shannon.
Click here to download Book Club Questions for The Long Mile, prepared by author Clyde W. Ford!
Winner – Debut Fiction
Freshwater Road
List Price: $13.95
Midnight Ink (Oct 08, 2005)
Fiction, Paperback, 256 pages
- Selected for 1 Book Club Reading Lists
- 2006 BCALA Literary Award
- Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Honored Book 2006
ISBN: 9781572841956Publisher: Llewellyn Publications
Book Description:
From award-winning actress Denise Nicholas: a ten-year anniversary reissue of her powerful and dramatic coming of age story set in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Freshwater Road has been called one of the best novels written about the Civil Rights Movement. Nicholas herself has been praised repeatedly over the years for her beautiful prose and is continually mentioned along with Alice Walker and Ernest J. Gaines as the most important novelists documenting this era.
When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in Freedom Summer, she s assigned to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier. As the long, hot summer unfolds, Celeste befriends several members of the community, but there are also those who are threatened by her and the change that her presence in the South represents. Finding inner strength as she helps lift the veil of oppression and learns valuable lessons about race, social change, and violence, Celeste prepares her adult students for their showdown with the county registrar. All the while, she struggles with loneliness, a worried father in Detroit, and her burgeoning feelings for Ed Jolivette, a young man also in Mississippi for the summer.
By summer s end, Celeste learns there are no easy answers to the questions that preoccupy her about violence and nonviolence, about race, identity, and color, and about the strength of love and family bonds. In Freshwater Road, Denise Nicholas has created an unforgettable story that more than ten years after first appearing in print continues to be one of the most cherished works of Civil Rights fiction.
From award-winning actress Denise Nicholas: a ten-year anniversary reissue of her powerful and dramatic coming of age story set in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Freshwater Road has been called one of the best novels written about the Civil Rights Movement. Nicholas herself has been praised repeatedly over the years for her beautiful prose and is continually mentioned along with Alice Walker and Ernest J. Gaines as the most important novelists documenting this era.
When University of Michigan sophomore Celeste Tyree travels to Mississippi to volunteer her efforts in Freedom Summer, she s assigned to help register voters in the small town of Pineyville, a place best known for a notorious lynching that occurred only a few years earlier. As the long, hot summer unfolds, Celeste befriends several members of the community, but there are also those who are threatened by her and the change that her presence in the South represents. Finding inner strength as she helps lift the veil of oppression and learns valuable lessons about race, social change, and violence, Celeste prepares her adult students for their showdown with the county registrar. All the while, she struggles with loneliness, a worried father in Detroit, and her burgeoning feelings for Ed Jolivette, a young man also in Mississippi for the summer.
By summer s end, Celeste learns there are no easy answers to the questions that preoccupy her about violence and nonviolence, about race, identity, and color, and about the strength of love and family bonds. In Freshwater Road, Denise Nicholas has created an unforgettable story that more than ten years after first appearing in print continues to be one of the most cherished works of Civil Rights fiction.
Winner – Fiction
My Jim: A Novel
by Nancy Rawles
List Price: $13.95
Midnight Ink (Oct 08, 2005)
Fiction, Paperback, 256 pages
ISBN: 9781400054008Publisher: Llewellyn Publications
Book Description:
A deeply moving recasting of one of the most controversial characters in American literature, Huckleberry Finn s Jim
Written in the great literary tradition of novels of American slavery, My Jim is told in the incantatory voice of Sadie Watson, an ex-slave who schools her granddaughter with lessons of love she learned in bondage. To help her granddaughter confront the decisions she needs to make, Sadie mines her memory for the tale of the unquenchable love of her life, Jim. Sadie s Jim was an ambitious young slave and seer who, when faced with the prospect of being sold, escaped down the Mississippi with a white boy named Huck. Sadie is suddenly left alone. Worried about her children, convinced her husband is dead, reviled as a witch, and punished for Jim s escape, Sadie s will and her love for Jim, even in absentia, animate her life and see her through.
Told with spare eloquence and mirroring the true stories of countless slave women, My Jim re-creates one of the most controversial characters in American literature. A nuanced critique of the great American novel, My Jim stands on its own as a haunting and inspiring story about freedom, longing, and the remarkable endurance of love.
A deeply moving recasting of one of the most controversial characters in American literature, Huckleberry Finn s Jim
Written in the great literary tradition of novels of American slavery, My Jim is told in the incantatory voice of Sadie Watson, an ex-slave who schools her granddaughter with lessons of love she learned in bondage. To help her granddaughter confront the decisions she needs to make, Sadie mines her memory for the tale of the unquenchable love of her life, Jim. Sadie s Jim was an ambitious young slave and seer who, when faced with the prospect of being sold, escaped down the Mississippi with a white boy named Huck. Sadie is suddenly left alone. Worried about her children, convinced her husband is dead, reviled as a witch, and punished for Jim s escape, Sadie s will and her love for Jim, even in absentia, animate her life and see her through.
Told with spare eloquence and mirroring the true stories of countless slave women, My Jim re-creates one of the most controversial characters in American literature. A nuanced critique of the great American novel, My Jim stands on its own as a haunting and inspiring story about freedom, longing, and the remarkable endurance of love.
Winner – Nonfiction
Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin
List Price: $13.95
Midnight Ink (Oct 08, 2005)
Fiction, Paperback, 256 pages
ISBN: 9780374530471Publisher: Llewellyn Publications
Book Description:
John Hope Franklin lived through America s most defining twentieth-century transformation, the dismantling of legally protected racial segregation. A renowned scholar, he has explored that transformation in its myriad aspects, notably in his 3.5-million-copy bestseller, From Slavery to Freedom. Born in 1915, he, like every other African American, could not help but participate: he was evicted from whites-only train cars, confined to segregated schools, threatened once with lynching and consistently subjected to racism s denigration of his humanity. Yet he managed to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard; become the first black historian to assume a full professorship at a white institution, Brooklyn College; and be appointed chair of the University of Chicago s history department and, later, John B. Duke Professor at Duke University. He has reshaped the way African American history is understood and taught and become one of the world s most celebrated historians, garnering over 130 honorary degrees. But Franklin s participation was much more fundamental than that.From his effort in 1934 to hand President Franklin Roosevelt a petition calling for action in response to the Cordie Cheek lynching, to his 1997 appointment by President Clinton to head the President s Initiative on Race, and continuing to the present, Franklin has influenced with determination and dignity the nation s racial conscience. Whether aiding Thurgood Marshall s preparation for arguing Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, marching to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, or testifying against Robert Bork s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, Franklin has pushed the national conversation on race toward humanity and equality, a life long effort that earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation s highest civilian honor, in 1995. Intimate, at times revelatory, Mirror to America chronicles Franklin s life and this nation s racial transformation in the twentieth century, and is a powerful reminder of the extent to which the problem of America remains the problem of color.
John Hope Franklin lived through America s most defining twentieth-century transformation, the dismantling of legally protected racial segregation. A renowned scholar, he has explored that transformation in its myriad aspects, notably in his 3.5-million-copy bestseller, From Slavery to Freedom. Born in 1915, he, like every other African American, could not help but participate: he was evicted from whites-only train cars, confined to segregated schools, threatened once with lynching and consistently subjected to racism s denigration of his humanity. Yet he managed to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard; become the first black historian to assume a full professorship at a white institution, Brooklyn College; and be appointed chair of the University of Chicago s history department and, later, John B. Duke Professor at Duke University. He has reshaped the way African American history is understood and taught and become one of the world s most celebrated historians, garnering over 130 honorary degrees. But Franklin s participation was much more fundamental than that.From his effort in 1934 to hand President Franklin Roosevelt a petition calling for action in response to the Cordie Cheek lynching, to his 1997 appointment by President Clinton to head the President s Initiative on Race, and continuing to the present, Franklin has influenced with determination and dignity the nation s racial conscience. Whether aiding Thurgood Marshall s preparation for arguing Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, marching to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, or testifying against Robert Bork s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987, Franklin has pushed the national conversation on race toward humanity and equality, a life long effort that earned him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation s highest civilian honor, in 1995. Intimate, at times revelatory, Mirror to America chronicles Franklin s life and this nation s racial transformation in the twentieth century, and is a powerful reminder of the extent to which the problem of America remains the problem of color.
Finalist – Debut Fiction
Upstate: A Novel
List Price: $13.95
Midnight Ink (Oct 08, 2005)
Fiction, Paperback, 256 pages
ISBN: 9780312332693Publisher: Llewellyn Publications
Book Description:
"Baby, the first thing I need to know from you is do you believe I killed my father?"So begins Upstate, a powerful story told through letters between seventeen-year-old Antonio and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Natasha, set in the 1990 s in New York. Antonio and Natasha s world is turned upside down, and their young love is put to the test, when Antonio finds himself in jail, accused of a shocking crime. Antonio fights to stay alive on the inside, while on the outside, Natasha faces choices that will change her life. Over the course of a decade, they share a desperate correspondence. Often, they have only each other to turn to as life takes them down separate paths and leaves them wondering if they will ever find their way back together. Startling, real, and filled with raw emotion, Upstate is an unforgettable coming-of-age story with a message of undeniable hope. Brilliant and profoundly felt, it is destined to speak to a new generation of readers.
"Baby, the first thing I need to know from you is do you believe I killed my father?"So begins Upstate, a powerful story told through letters between seventeen-year-old Antonio and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Natasha, set in the 1990 s in New York. Antonio and Natasha s world is turned upside down, and their young love is put to the test, when Antonio finds himself in jail, accused of a shocking crime. Antonio fights to stay alive on the inside, while on the outside, Natasha faces choices that will change her life. Over the course of a decade, they share a desperate correspondence. Often, they have only each other to turn to as life takes them down separate paths and leaves them wondering if they will ever find their way back together. Startling, real, and filled with raw emotion, Upstate is an unforgettable coming-of-age story with a message of undeniable hope. Brilliant and profoundly felt, it is destined to speak to a new generation of readers.
