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 2018
The Talented Ribkins
Read Our Review of The Talented Ribkins
For sheer reading pleasure Ladee Hubbard s original and wildly inventive novel is in a class by itself. Toni Morrison
The Talented Ribkins is a charming and delightful debut novel with a profound heart, and Ladee Hubbard s voice is a welcome original. Mary Gaitskill
• An INDIE NEXT 2017 pick
• Winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer s Award
• Winner of the William Faulkner - William Wisdom Prize
At seventy-two, Johnny Ribkins shouldn t have such problems: He s got one week to come up with the money he stole from his mobster boss or it s curtains.
What may or may not be useful to Johnny as he flees is that he comes from an African-American family that has been gifted with super powers that are a bit, well, odd. Okay, very odd. For example, Johnny s father could see colors no one else could see. His brother could scale perfectly flat walls. His cousin belches fire. And Johnny himself can make precise maps of any space you name, whether he s been there or not.
In the old days, the Ribkins family tried to apply their gifts to the civil rights effort, calling themselves The Justice Committee. But when their, eh, superpowers proved insufficient, the group fell apart. Out of frustration Johnny and his brother used their talents to stage a series of burglaries, each more daring than the last.
Fast forward a couple decades and Johnny s on a race against the clock to dig up loot he s stashed all over Florida. His brother is gone, but he has an unexpected sidekick: his brother s daughter, Eloise, who has a special superpower of her own.
Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois s famous essay The Talented Tenth and fuelled by Ladee Hubbard s marvelously original imagination, The Talented Ribkins is a big-hearted debut novel about race, class, politics, and the unique gifts that, while they may cause some problems from time to time, bind a family together.
Black Moses: A Novel
Read Our Review of Black Moses: A Novel
LONG-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
A rollicking new novel described as Oliver Twist in 1970s Africa (Les Inrockuptibles) from Africa s Samuel Beckett one of the continent s greatest living writers (The Guardian).
It s not easy being Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. There s that long name of his for a start, which means, "Let us thank God, the black Moses is born on the lands of the ancestors." Most people just call him Moses. Then there s the orphanage where he lives, run by a malicious political stooge, Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, and where he s terrorized by two fellow orphans the twins Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala.
But after Moses exacts revenge on the twins by lacing their food with hot pepper, the twins take Moses under their wing, escape the orphanage, and move to the bustling port town of Pointe-Noire, where they form a gang that survives on petty theft. What follows is a funny, moving, larger-than-life tale that chronicles Moses s ultimately tragic journey through the Pointe-Noire underworld and the politically repressive world of Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s and 80s.
Mabanckou s vivid portrayal of Moses s mental collapse echoes the work of Hugo, Dickens, and Brian DePalma s Scarface, confirming Mabanckou s status as one of our great storytellers. Black Moses is a vital new extension of his cycle of Pointe-Noire novels that stand out as one of the grandest, funniest, fictional projects of our time.
The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits
by Tiya Miles
Read Our Review of The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits
Finalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize
Nominated for the 2018 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction)
A New York Times Editor s Choice selection
Winner of 2018 Merle Curti Social History Award
Co-Winner of the 2018 James A. Rawley Prize
A Michigan Notable Book of 2018
A Booklist Editors Choice Title for 2017
If many Americans imagine slavery essentially as a system in which black men toiled on cotton plantations, Miles upends that stereotype several times over.
New York Times Book Review
[Miles] has compiled documentation that does for Detroit what the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers Project slave narratives did for other regions, primarily the South.
Washington Post
[Tiya Miles] is among the best when it comes to blending artful storytelling with an unwavering sense of social justice.
Martha S. Jones in The Chronicle of Higher Education
A necessary work of powerful, probing scholarship.
Publisher Weekly (starred)
A book likely to stand at the head of further research into the problem of Native and African-American slavery in the north country.
Kirkus Reviews
From the MacArthur genius grant winner, a beautifully written and revelatory look at the slave origins of a major northern American city
Most Americans believe that slavery was a creature of the South, and that Northern states and territories provided stops on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. In this paradigm-shifting book, celebrated historian Tiya Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest s iconic city: Detroit.
In this richly researched and eye-opening book, Miles has pieced together the experience of the unfree both native and African American in the frontier outpost of Detroit, a place wildly remote yet at the center of national and international conflict. Skillfully assembling fragments of a distant historical record, Miles introduces new historical figures and unearths struggles that remained hidden from view until now. The result is fascinating history, little explored and eloquently told, of the limits of freedom in early America, one that adds new layers of complexity to the story of a place that exerts a strong fascination in the media and among public intellectuals, artists, and activists.
A book that opens the door on a completely hidden past, The Dawn of Detroit is a powerful and elegantly written history, one that completely changes our understanding of slavery s American legacy.
Semiautomatic
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Poetry that acts as a fierce and loving resistance to violence.
Art can t shield our bodies or stabilize the earth s climate, but semiautomatic by Evie Shockley insists that it can nurture the spirit and rekindle the imagination. The collection reacts primarily to the twenty-first century s unmistakable evidence of the conditions of black life experiences that aren t exactly new but have become more transparent in recent times. The poems weave an intricate web, drawing links between various forms of violence that impact individuals across racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic divides that may or may not segregate us. How can we preserve our humanity our capacity to feel profoundly and think independently in light of an almost constant barrage of physical, societal, and environmental transgressions? Where do we unearth language that aptly conveys, processes, and contests the offenses and wounds we observe and endure? What actions can jolt us from a repetitive emotional loop, where we oscillate between outrage, grief, and despair?
In compositions that range from fragments to narratives, quizzes to constraints, from structured to prose and sequences to songs, semiautomatic scours both the past and present, seeking beacons to guide us toward a more optimistic future.
Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education
by Noliwe Rooks
Read Our Review of Cutting School: The Segrenomics of American Education
2018 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction) Finalist
A timely indictment of the corporate takeover of education and the privatization and profitability of separate and unequal schools, published at a critical time in the dismantling of public education in America
An astounding look at America s segregated school system, weaving together historical dynamics of race, class, and growing inequality into one concise and commanding story. Cutting School puts our schools at the center of the fight for a new commons.
Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything
Public schools are among America s greatest achievements in modern history, yet from the earliest days of tax-supported education today a sector with an estimated budget of over half a billion dollars there have been intractable tensions tied to race and poverty. Now, in an era characterized by levels of school segregation the country has not seen since the mid-twentieth century, cultural critic and American studies professor Noliwe Rooks provides a trenchant analysis of our separate and unequal schools and argues that profiting from our nation s failure to provide a high-quality education to all children has become a very big business.
Cutting School deftly traces the financing of segregated education in America, from reconstruction through Brown v. Board of Education up to the current controversies around school choice, teacher quality, the school-to-prison pipeline, and more, to elucidate the course we are on today: the wholesale privatization of our schools. Rooks s incisive critique breaks down the fraught landscape of segrenomics, showing how experimental solutions to the so-called achievement gaps including charters, vouchers, and cyber schools rely on, profit from, and ultimately exacerbate disturbingly high levels of racial and economic segregation under the guise of providing equal opportunity.
Rooks chronicles the making and unmaking of public education and the disastrous impact of funneling public dollars to private for-profit and nonprofit operations. As the infrastructure crumbles, a number of major U.S. cities are poised to permanently dismantle their public school systems the very foundation of our multicultural democracy. Yet Rooks finds hope and promise in the inspired individuals and powerful movements fighting to save urban schools.
A comprehensive, compelling account of what s truly at stake in the relentless push to deregulate and privatize, Cutting School is a cri de coeur for all of us to resist educational apartheid in America.
