Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominees and Winning Books

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About the Book

Sing a Black Girl s Song is an extraordinary collection of unpublished works by the award-winning American literary icon Ntozake Shange. The anthology features essays, plays, and poems curated by National Book Award winner Imani Perry, and includes a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Tarana Burke. This collection serves as a continuation of Shange s powerful legacy, standing shoulder to shoulder with other Black literary giants like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

A Trailblazer s Journey

Beginning as a budding writer at Barnard College in the late 60s, Shange grew into a literary force that transcended genre and form. By the time of her passing in 2018, she had etched an indelible mark on the American literary landscape. Her work was not just prose or poetry; it was a blend of dance, song, and verse that spoke volumes to the experiences of Black women and girls, as well as to the wider community.

Inside the Collection

The collection takes us on a literary journey through Shange s life, shedding light on her formative years, the inspirations behind her seminal work for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, and her accomplishments thereafter. It features:

• Early poems and politically charged verses from the Black Arts Movement era
• Insights into her therapy sessions in a piece titled "The Couch"
• Unpublished plays written after the international success of for colored girls
• Essays and writings that capture the minutia and nuance of Black life

Legacy Continued

Sing a Black Girl s Song is more than a collection; it s a long-lasting gift to current and future generations. It captures Shange s tender rhythm and cadence, as well as her fiery, revolutionary spirit. This posthumous collection solidifies her role as one of the most influential and fiercely celebrated artists of our time, and bolsters a literary tradition that has been a bedrock for generations of writers.

Mothers never die. Children love to resurrect us in they stories.

Folktales and spirits animate this lively and unforgettable coming-of-age tale of two Jamaican-Trinidadian sisters in Brooklyn grappling with their mother s illness, their father s infidelity, and the truth of their family s past.

Sisters Zora and Sasha Porter are drifting apart. Bearing witness to their father s violence and their mother s worsening illness, an unsettled Zora escapes into her journal, dreaming of being a writer, while Sasha discovers sex and chest binding, spending more time with her new girlfriend than at home.

But the sisters, like their parents, must come together to answer to something more ancient and powerful than they know and reckon with a family secret buried in the past. A tale told from the perspective of a mischievous narrator, featuring the Rolling Calf who haunts butchers, Mama Dglo who lives in the ocean, a vain tiger, and an outsmarted snake, The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts is set in a world as alive and unpredictable as Helen Oyeyemi s.

Telling of the love between sisters who don t always see eye to eye, this extraordinary debut novel is a celebration of the power of stories, asking, What happens to us when our stories are erased? Do we disappear? Or do we come back haunting?

The History of a Difficult Child is an extraordinary novel. Maaza Mengiste, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Shadow King

A breathtaking, tragicomic debut novel about the indomitable child of a scorned, formerly land-owning family who must grow up in the wake of Ethiopia s socialist revolution.

Wisecracking, inquisitive, and bombastic, Selam Asmelash is the youngest child in her large, boisterous family. Even before she is born, she has a wry, bewitching omniscience that animates life in her Small Town in southwestern Ethiopia in the 1980s. Selam and her father listen to the radio in secret as the socialist military junta that recently overthrew the government seizes properties and wages civil war in the North. The Asmelashes, once an enterprising, land-owning family, are ostracized under the new regime. In the Small Town where they live, nosy women convene around coffee ceremonies multiple times a day, the gossip spreading like wildfire.

As Selam s mother, the powerful and relentlessly dignified Degitu, grows ill, she embraces a persecuted, Pentecostal God and insists her family convert alongside her. The Asmelashes stand solidly in opposition to the times, and Selam grows up seeking revenge on despotic comrades, neighborhood bullies, and a ruthless God. Wise beyond her years yet thoroughly naive, she contends with an inner fury, a profound sadness, and a throbbing, unstoppable pursuit of education, freedom, and love.

Told through the perspective of its charming and irresistible narrator, The History of a Difficult Child is about what happens when mother, God, and country are at odds, and how one difficult child finds her voice.

A multigenerational saga of a family and a community in Tulsa s Greenwood district, known as Black Wall Street, that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification.

The scope, the elegance, and the power of Victor Luckerson s tale is simply breathtaking and empowering. Carol Anderson, author of White Rage

When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, in 1914, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming a national center of black life. But, just seven years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the most brutal acts of racist violence in U.S. history, a ruthless attempt to smother a spark of black independence.

But that was never the whole story of Greenwood. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt it into a Mecca, in Ed s words, where nightlife thrived, small businesses flourished, and an underworld economy lived comfortably alongside public storefronts. Prosperity and poverty intermixed, and icons from W.E.B. Du Bois to Muhammad Ali ambled down Greenwood Avenue, alongside maids, doctors, and every occupation in between. Ed grew into a prominent businessman and bought a newspaper called the Oklahoma Eagle to chronicle Greenwood s resurgence and battles against white bigotry. He and his wife, Jeanne, raised an ambitious family, and their son Jim, an attorney, embodied their hopes for the Civil Rights Movement in his work. But by the 1970s, urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood, even as Jim and his neighbors tried to hold on to it. Today, while new high-rises and encroaching gentrification risk wiping out Greenwood s legacy for good, the family newspaper remains, and Ed s granddaughter Regina represents the neighborhood in the Oklahoma state legislature, working alongside a new generation of local activists.

In Built from the Fire, journalist Victor Luckerson moves beyond the mythology of Black Wall Street to tell the story of an aspirant black neighborhood that, like so many others, has long been buffeted by racist government policies. Through the eyes of dozens of race massacre survivors and their descendants, Luckerson delivers an honest, moving portrait of this potent national symbol of success and solidarity and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased.

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The Wreck is equal parts investigative and deeply introspective a profound memoir about recognizing the echoes of history within ourselves, and the alchemy of turning inherited grief into renewal.

There is a secret that young Cassandra Jackson doesn t know, and it s evident in the way her father cries her name out in his sleep. Through awkward encounters with family, she comes to realize that she is named after her father s niece, and looks eerily like the child s mother, both of whom were killed in a car wreck along with her father s beloved mother, and as she soon discovers his first wife. Cassandra learns to keep silent about the wreck, but soon learns there is no way to outpace the claw-like grip of her family s past trauma.

In this luminous memoir, Jackson attempts to unearth her lost family, while also creating a new one only to discover little progress separates the past from the present. As she moves back and forth between her girlhood and her journey to motherhood, Jackson reveals the chilling parallels between the harrowing inhumanity of Jim Crow medical care and the toxic discrimination that undergirds healthcare in the United States today. But as she traces the cascading effects of loss punctuated by racism, she also discovers a powerful legacy of fearless love and furious perseverance that she hopes to extend to a new generation.

Lyrical, urgent, and wise, this is an unforgettable story of reclaiming the past to reclaim ourselves.

In this astonishing volume of poems and lyric prose, Whiting Award-winner A. Van Jordan draws comparisons to Black characters in Shakespearean plays Caliban and Sycorax from The Tempest, Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus, and the eponymous antihero of Othello to mourn the deaths of Black people, particularly Black children, at the hands of police officers. What do these characters, and the ways they are defined by the white figures who surround them, have in common with Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and other Black people killed in the twenty-first century?

Balancing anger and grief with celebration, Jordan employs an elastic variety of poetic forms, including ekphrastic sestinas inspired by the photography of Malick Sidibé, fictional dialogues, and his signature definition poems that break down the insidious power of words like fair, suspect, and juvenile. He invents a new form of window poems, based on a characterization exercise, to see Shakespeare s Black characters in three dimensions, and finds contemporary parallels in the way these characters are othered, rendered at once undesirable and hypersexualized, a threat and a joke.

At once a stunning inquiry into the roots of racist violence and a moving recognition of the joy of Black youth before the world takes hold, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again expresses the preciousness and precarity of life.

Moses Ose Utomi s debut novella, The Lies of the Ajungo, follows one boy s epic quest to bring water back to his city and save his mother s life. Prepare to enter the Forever Desert.

A Library Journal Best Book of the Month!

They say there is no water in the City of Lies. They say there are no heroes in the City of Lies. They say there are no friends beyond the City of Lies. But would you believe what they say in the City of Lies?

In the City of Lies, they cut out your tongue when you turn thirteen, to appease the terrifying Ajungo Empire and make sure it continues sending water. Tutu will be thirteen in three days, but his parched mother won t last that long. So Tutu goes to his oba and makes a deal: she provides water for his mother, and in exchange he will travel out into the desert and bring back water for the city. Thus begins Tutu s quest for the salvation of his mother, his city, and himself.

The Lies of the Ajungo opens the curtains on a tremendous world, and begins the epic fable of the Forever Desert. With every word, Moses Ose Utomi weaves magic.

From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival

"[A] powerful book." Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead

From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter s squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there.

Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can t forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger.

Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint s father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living.

Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte s venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava s inheritance.

As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there.

Brilliant, explosive, vitally important new work from one of America s most fiercely talented storytellers.

The explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black, about two top women gladiators fighting for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America s own.

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara Hurricane Staxxx Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar s path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system s unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means from a new and necessary American voice (Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review).

The intimate and heartbreaking story of a Black undercover police officer who famously kneeled by the assassinated Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and a daughter s quest for the truth about her father

In the famous photograph of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the balcony of Memphis s Lorraine Motel, one man kneeled down beside King, trying to staunch the blood from his fatal head wound with a borrowed towel.

This kneeling man was a member of the Invaders, an activist group that was in talks with King in the days leading up to the murder. But he also had another identity: an undercover Memphis police officer reporting on the activities of this group, which was thought to be possibly dangerous and potentially violent. This kneeling man is Leta McCollough Seletzky s father.

Marrell McCollough was a Black man working secretly with the white power structure, a spy. This was so far from her understanding of what it meant to be Black in America, of everything she eventually devoted her life and career to, that she set out to learn what she could about his life, his actions and motivations. But with that decision came risk. What would she uncover about her father, who went on to a career at the CIA, and did she want to bear the weight of knowing?

Dedicated to friends, fellow artists, and resilient working people, The Beloved Community sees Jones at her best as she writes toward and in search of all that connects and disconnects us.

In her fifth poetry collection, The Beloved Community, Jackson Poetry Prize winner Patricia Spears Jones interrogates the necessity and fragility of human bonds: sensual, familial, societal. From lyric to elegy, far-reaching poems use word play and metaphor to create richly textured landscapes in search of community. As we traverse delis, laundromats, and the Brooklyn block where morning glories grow leaves plump as Italian cookies, poems about poverty, art, and community, become poems about location always the city is alive and breathing. Later, the collection widens its view, leaving Brooklyn to visit the consequences of violence across America.

From the Atlanta Child Murders to the murder of Nia Wilson, The Beloved Community is fearless in its rage and hope as it explores what disrupts oppression, injustice, loss, grief, and a fraught sense of the erotic. Largely dedicated to musicians, artists, and fellow poets, Jones acknowledges art as tools for both care and resistance, recognizing that voice is our greatest magic. Imbued with history, laced with tenderness, and channeling a long tradition of the blues in African American poetics, The Beloved Community speaks with spark and urgency.