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Tag Archives: winners
Congressman John Lewis Publishes Graphic Novel Of Civil Rights Movement
“Some of you may be asking: ‘Hey, John Lewis, why are you trying to write a comic book?’” said the legendary civil rights leader, smiling at the incongruity of this development for an audience at Book Expo America, the annual publishing trade show in Manhattan.
John Lewis was 17 when he met Rosa Parks; 18 when he joined forces with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Five years later, he was one of the “big six,” an architect of the historic Civil Rights March on Washington in August 1963. Standing at the Lincoln memorial, Lewis spoke sixth and King spoke tenth, stamping the day with his immortal “I Have a Dream.” Of all those who addressed the throng a half century ago, Lewis is the only one left.
Now, at 73, he has become the first member of the U.S. Congress to... Read More →
REVIEW: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Soars With “Americanah”
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf, 477 pp., $26.95
Hair asserts itself on the first page of “Americanah,” a knowing, prickly and virtuosic novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She was 29 when she won an Anisfield-Wolf award in 2007 for “Half of a Yellow Sun”; she picked up a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant the following year. Her mother, a Nigerian university registrar, likes to say little Chimamanda started to read when she was 2. The writer herself thinks it was probably around age 4.
“Americanah” wears its genius lightly, starting with a pleasurable and assured set-up chapter that puts its central character Ifemelu on a train from Princeton to Trenton, N.J. Her mission: to have her hair braided. After 13 years stateside, most recently on a fellowship to... Read More →
VIDEO: “Nollywood” Brings Adaptation of Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun”
If you can't find the art you want, make it yourself.
That was famously the mindset of Jay-Z, when the rapper started Roc-A-Fella Records in 1995, and that DIY approach animates "Nollywood," the Nigerian film industry.
Approximately 1,000 Nigerian movies are produced each year, surpassing the 800 films churned out annually in the U.S. For innovators everywhere, digital innovations have lowered technological barriers and production costs. Without a formal distribution model, Nigerian film prospers—many movies are watched at home in a nation of few theaters.
One of this year’s most anticipated projects is the adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun, scheduled for release in November 2013. The book won an Anisfield-Wolf award for fiction in 2007... Read More →
Easy Rawlins Returns In Walter Mosley’s Latest Thriller
Anisfield-Wolf winner Walter Mosley gave his readers a true cliff hanger in his last Easy Rawlins book, 2007's Blonde Faith. The writer left L.A. Detective Rawlins clinging to a cliff. Many assumed the reluctant cop was dead. In the past six years, Mosley has focused on his Leonid McGill detective series, and hinted in interviews that Rawlins' injuries were indeed fatal.
But Little Green brings Rawlins back from the brink. The new novel is set in the late 1960s, when the detective reunites with old friends and navigates a changing place for black men in American society. (Mosley won his Anisfield-Wolf award in 1998 for “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,” the story of an ex-con in Watts.)
Intrigued? Here are some tidbits to hold you over until you can get your hands on a... Read More →
Meet Eugene Gloria, 2013 Winner For Poetry
Eugene Gloria's 2012 poetry collection, My Favorite Warlord, won this year's Anisfield-Wolf prize for poetry. Born in Manila, Phillippines, Gloria uses My Favorite Warlord's 35 poems to explore Filipino heritage, samurai, fathers, masculinity, and memory.
Publishers Weekly praised the work, noting that Gloria "sets himself confidently against injustice, in favor of inquiry, amid the eclectic language of contemporary scenes."
Gloria has written two other books of poems—Hoodlum Bird (2006) and Drivers at the Short-Time Motel (2000). His honors and awards include an Asian American Literary Award, a Fulbright Research Grant, a San Francisco Art Commission grant, a Poetry Society of America award, and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches creative writing and English literature at DePauw Univ... Read More →
Meet Kevin Powers, 2013 Winner For Fiction
The road home from war is a long journey to rediscover who you are. Author Kevin Powers, who signed up for the Army at 17 and spent time as a machine gunner in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, wrote his award-winning novel, The Yellow Birds, as a way to help him process what he had experienced on the front lines.
"I started initially writing poems about the war," he said during an interview with PBS NewsHour. "I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13. And I realized that I needed a larger canvas to say what I wanted to say, to answer the question that people were asking me, which was what was it like over there."
In the novel, we see life in a war zone through the eyes of 21-year-old private John Bartle. He is tasked with watching over Murph, a younger solider with less... Read More →
Meet Andrew Solomon, 2013 Winner For Nonfiction
Culled from more than 40,000 pages of interview transcripts, Andrew Solomon's Far From The Tree takes an exhaustive look at families where the child's identity is considered to be on the margins of society.
Within the book, Solomon considers how parents navigate the world when a child is deaf, autistic, a dwarf, a criminal, a protégée, has Down Syndrome, and four other identities. Solomon highlights the struggle and beauty in each family's story, sharing how parents come to accept their children amid the differences that threaten to come between them. The book chronicles the immense love of family, the quest toward a more compassionate world, and the beauty of diversity in all forms.
In deliberations for this year's awards, juror Steven Pinker wrote: “This is a monumental... Read More →
Meet Laird Hunt, 2013 Winner For Fiction
Laird Hunt is the author of five novels and one short story collection. His latest book, Kind One, won the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf award for fiction. In a video interview with Rain Taxi, Hunt describes being moved by a short passage in Edward P. Jones' The Known World, which prompted him to start writing Kind One:
"He describes this anecdote about a woman who lives in this imaginary county he's constructed, who lives with her husband and two female slaves. One day the husband comes up dead and the slaves turn the tables on her and enslave her in turn. And then it's over and never mentioned again. But I got really interested in what would happen if this woman, many years later, describes what happens, with the idea of placing her voice somewhere in the slippery middle between victim and... Read More →
Meet Our 2013 Winners!
The jury has spoken and five new authors will join the Anisfield-Wolf family.
Our 2013 winners are:
Laird Hunt, Kind One, Fiction
Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds, Fiction
Eugene Gloria, My Favorite Warlord, Poetry
Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree, Nonfiction
Wole Soyinka, Lifetime Achievement
“The 2013 Anisfield-Wolf winners are exemplars who broaden our vision of race and diversity,” said Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who chairs the jury. “This year, there is exceptional writing about the war in Iraq, slavery on a Kentucky pig farm, the Filipino experience in the U.S., and the complexity of families in which a child is radically different from parents.”
Gates directs the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, where... Read More →
“Less Than Human”: How One Professor Explores Deeper Meaning Behind Dehumanization
By Lisa Nielson, Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow
Lisa Nielson is the Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University. She has a PhD in historical musicology, with a specialization in Women's Studes, and teaches seminars on the harem, slavery and courtesans.
I was introduced to “Less than Human” last fall when I had the pleasure of hearing David Livingstone Smith speak at the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony and at Case Western Reserve University the next day. His presentation was riveting, and I felt myself vacillating between awe at the breadth of his work and shock at the horror of what humanity has done through dehumanization.
Judging from the taut silence as the awards audience of 800 heard Smith speak, they had a similar reaction. Listeners occasionally... Read More →
