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 2008
Winner – Debut Fiction
She’s Gone
by Kwame Dawes
List Price: $16.95
Akashic Books (Feb 01, 2007)
Fiction, Paperback, 350 pages
ISBN: 9781933354187Publisher: Akashic Books
Book Description:
The debut novel from Jamaica s award-winning poet.
The debut novel from Jamaica s award-winning poet.
Winner – Fiction
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
List Price: $16.00
Riverhead Books (Sep 02, 2008)
Fiction, Paperback, 339 pages
ISBN: 9781594483295Publisher: Penguin Random House
Book Description:
Winner of:
The Pulitzer Prize
The National Book Critics Circle Award
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize
A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year
One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fuk a curse that has haunted Oscar s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere and risk it all in the name of love.
Winner of:
The Pulitzer Prize
The National Book Critics Circle Award
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize
A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year
One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fuk a curse that has haunted Oscar s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere and risk it all in the name of love.
Winner – Nonfiction
Brother, I’m Dying
List Price: $23.95
Knopf (Sep 04, 2007)
Fiction, Hardcover, 288 pages
ISBN: 9781400034307Publisher: Penguin Random House
Book Description:
From the best-selling author of The Dew Breaker, a major work of nonfiction: a powerfully moving family story that centers around the men closest to her heart her father, Mira, and his older brother, Joseph.
From the age of four, Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph, a charismatic pastor, as her second father, when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for a better life in America. Listening to his sermons, sharing coconut-flavored ices on their walks through town, roaming through the house that held together many members of a colorful extended family, Edwidge grew profoundly attached to Joseph. He was the man who knew all the verses for love.
And so she experiences a jumble of emotions when, at twelve, she joins her parents in New York City. She is at last reunited with her two youngest brothers, and with her mother and father, whom she has struggled to remember. But she must also leave behind Joseph and the only home she s ever known.
Edwidge tells of making a new life in a new country while fearing for the safety of those still in Haiti as the political situation deteriorates. But Brother I m Dying soon becomes a terrifying tale of good people caught up in events beyond their control. Late in 2004, his life threatened by an angry mob, forced to flee his church, the frail, eighty-one-year-old Joseph makes his way to Miami, where he thinks he will be safe. Instead, he is detained by U.S. Customs, held by the Department of Homeland Security, brutally imprisoned, and dead within days. It was a story that made headlines around the world. His brother, Mira, will soon join him in death, but not before he holds hope in his arms: Edwidge s firstborn, who will bear his name and the family s stories, both joyous and tragic into the next generation.
Told with tremendous feeling, this is a true-life epic on an intimate scale: a deeply affecting story of home and family of two men s lives and deaths, and of a daughter s great love for them both.
From the best-selling author of The Dew Breaker, a major work of nonfiction: a powerfully moving family story that centers around the men closest to her heart her father, Mira, and his older brother, Joseph.
From the age of four, Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph, a charismatic pastor, as her second father, when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for a better life in America. Listening to his sermons, sharing coconut-flavored ices on their walks through town, roaming through the house that held together many members of a colorful extended family, Edwidge grew profoundly attached to Joseph. He was the man who knew all the verses for love.
And so she experiences a jumble of emotions when, at twelve, she joins her parents in New York City. She is at last reunited with her two youngest brothers, and with her mother and father, whom she has struggled to remember. But she must also leave behind Joseph and the only home she s ever known.
Edwidge tells of making a new life in a new country while fearing for the safety of those still in Haiti as the political situation deteriorates. But Brother I m Dying soon becomes a terrifying tale of good people caught up in events beyond their control. Late in 2004, his life threatened by an angry mob, forced to flee his church, the frail, eighty-one-year-old Joseph makes his way to Miami, where he thinks he will be safe. Instead, he is detained by U.S. Customs, held by the Department of Homeland Security, brutally imprisoned, and dead within days. It was a story that made headlines around the world. His brother, Mira, will soon join him in death, but not before he holds hope in his arms: Edwidge s firstborn, who will bear his name and the family s stories, both joyous and tragic into the next generation.
Told with tremendous feeling, this is a true-life epic on an intimate scale: a deeply affecting story of home and family of two men s lives and deaths, and of a daughter s great love for them both.
Winner – Poetry
Bouquet of Hungers: Poems
by Kyle Dargan
List Price: $19.95
University of Georgia Press (Oct 25, 2007)
Poetry, Paperback, 112 pages
ISBN: 9780820330310Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Book Description:
Kyle Dargan s new collection of poetry reflects his many passions as a poet, his deep engagament with what it means to work in the African American literary tradition, and his lively voice, infused with hip-hop sensibility and idiom. Skillfully blending vernacular and elegant diction, his clipped and reflective phrasings create animated poems that take on a myriad of concerns. Moving through such subjects as a midnight wait in the Washington, D.C., bus station, men on exhibit at the 1904 World s Fair, the sights and sounds of an Indiana karaoke bar, and an imagined escaped slave turned to stone, Dargan s work continually shifts lenses to examine an America increasingly stifled by dogmas and inept social categories. At the core of the book is compassion for the individuals who populate it, and from that compassion grows a hunger for the old identities, in which we encase ourselves, to come undone.From "Palinode, Once Removed": The day we pursue metaphor, I will / teach them about the brain how there is a center / to catch discrepancy between the expected / and the perceived. Stimulate the mechanism. / you are working in metaphor. / Though surprising / I am not a metaphor. This is: I am a period, / small and dark. If you read me correctly, / you are to stop. Pause. Breathe.
Kyle Dargan s new collection of poetry reflects his many passions as a poet, his deep engagament with what it means to work in the African American literary tradition, and his lively voice, infused with hip-hop sensibility and idiom. Skillfully blending vernacular and elegant diction, his clipped and reflective phrasings create animated poems that take on a myriad of concerns. Moving through such subjects as a midnight wait in the Washington, D.C., bus station, men on exhibit at the 1904 World s Fair, the sights and sounds of an Indiana karaoke bar, and an imagined escaped slave turned to stone, Dargan s work continually shifts lenses to examine an America increasingly stifled by dogmas and inept social categories. At the core of the book is compassion for the individuals who populate it, and from that compassion grows a hunger for the old identities, in which we encase ourselves, to come undone.From "Palinode, Once Removed": The day we pursue metaphor, I will / teach them about the brain how there is a center / to catch discrepancy between the expected / and the perceived. Stimulate the mechanism. / you are working in metaphor. / Though surprising / I am not a metaphor. This is: I am a period, / small and dark. If you read me correctly, / you are to stop. Pause. Breathe.
