Search Results: AC

Steel Drivin’ Man, which explores the real life and legend of railway hero John Henry, received the Merle Curti Prize for best hook in U.S. social and cultural history from the Organization of American Historians and the National Award for Arts Writing.

‘Blue Front,’ the book-length poem based on a lynching her father witnessed when he was five years old in Cairo, Illinois, was also chosen as one of “25 Books to Remember from 2006” by the New York Public Library and won an Ohioana Book Award.

Her second novel, “Half of a Yellow Sun,” also the title of one of her short stories, is set before and during the Biafran War.

‘On Beauty’ was recognized with the Orange Prize for Fiction and The Commonwealth Writers’ Best Book Award (Eurasia Section). In addition, the novel was short listed for the Man Booker Prize and was selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2005.

In addition to the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, “New York Burning” was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Writing these novels was as often as not a sobering learning experience. “Beetlecreek” taught me that Truth is seldom a blazing billboard of light, but as often as not the revelation of a gentle unfolding flower.

These works explore the heritage and experience of African-Americans, decade-by-decade, over the course of the twentieth century.

The word “macnolia,” he tellingly suggests, means “a Negro who spells and reads as well as [if not better than] any white”—and it gives him a convincing way to concentrate on an individual life while also exploring social attitudes and racial prejudices of Depression-era America.

‘The Dew Breaker’ is a beautifully constructed novel that spirals back to the reformed prison guard at the end, while holding unanswered the question of redemption.

Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in St. Lucia, Windward Islands, the West Indies, and has maintained a permanent residence in Trinidad for more than 20 years.

More than anything, LeBlanc shows how demanding poverty is. Her prose is plain and unsentimental, blessedly jargon-free, and including street talk only when one of her subjects wants to “conversate.” This fine work deserves attention from policy makers and general readers alike.

Impossible to rush through, “The Known World” is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected connections, some reaching into the present day.

Berlin has long been concerned with studying what he termed the “striking diversity” in African-American life under slavery—a diversity that, he argues, is especially evident when one is attentive to differences over space and time.

Her awards include a 1999 Pushcart Prize, a 1998 Poets & Writers Exchange Program’s Discovery award, a “Discovery”/The Nation award, fellowships from the Watson Foundation, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

The emotional force of Power’s argument is carried by moving, sometimes almost unbearable stories of the victims and survivors of such brutality.

Adrienne Kennedy has been a force in American theatre since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights with her hauntingly fragmentary lyrical dramas.

Stephen L. Carter has helped shape the national debate on issues ranging from the role of religion in American politics and culture to the impact of integrity and civility in our daily lives.

Wright’s latest work, “Transfigurations: Collected Poems” has been called ‘nothing less than the great work of art.’

Smart, learned and soaringly ambitious, his second novel consolidates his position as one of the leading writers of serious fiction of his generation.

In the 1960s, Jordan was an advocate for the desegregation of Georgia’s colleges and helped escort a female black student through an angry mob when the University of Georgia was desegregated.