Award Winners Announced

I recently had the honor of judging the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation's College Writing Award in the fiction category. I read some really good stories, and for awhile I wasn't sure what was going to distinguish one as the winner. Then I read a story called "Belly." That decided it. Such a good story, from a writer the world is going to hear more from. I read the stories anonymously, and I've only recently heard who the winners actually are. 

The Foundation has just announced them!

And, by the way, this is the same award that I won way back in 1992. Good things come of it!

Hurston/Wright 2015 Weekend Writing Workshops

Very pleased to be returning to the Hurston/Wright Foundation yet again to teach a workshop on writing historical and fantastical fiction.

See brochure for details:

Legacy Award Nominees

I had the pleasure of serving as one of the judges for this year's Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. This is an award for black writers from around the world, so long as their book was published in the US.

There were some very good books in the mix - as there are every year. Some featured contemporary issues, some looked at history, many had truly international perspectives and settings.

The winners haven't been announced yet, but the nominees have.

You can check them out HERE.

Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Winners

Just wanted to bring your attention to another award announcement. The Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards have just been announced. These are, to quote their own information:

"The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award™ is the first national award presented to published writers of African descent by the national community of Black writers. This award consists of prizes for the highest quality writing in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry."

I've had the pleasure of working with Hurston/Wright quite a bit over the years. They've even been kind enough to throw some award recognition my way on occasion, for which I'm very grateful. This year I'm just a bystander, but I'm impressed by the list of finalists and by the open-mindedness of the judging.

In the Fiction Category, the Finalists were:

Crossbones, by Nuruddin Farah

Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones

Mr. Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi

You Are Free: Stories, by Danzy Senna

Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward

Zone One, by Colson Whitehead

Do you know how impressive this list is, and how diverse? It includes a post apocalyptic zombie novel by a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" grant winner, a National Book Award winning novel about a family caught in a hurricane in the Gulf, a short story collection by a Whiting Award winner, a really hard to describe slipstream sounding novel by a British novelist, a very popular coming of age novel from the American South, and a novel by a Somali author who has been translated into seventeen languages!

It's pretty amazing. These six authors could be contenders on any list, but I find something inspiring about them being praised as wonderful works by a distinct voices, each of them successful in the own way.

By the way, Helen Oyeyemi won for Mr. Fox!

Here's a link to the H/W website list of nominees.

Legacy Award Nominees 2009

The Hurston/Wright Foundation has announced the finalists for this year's Legacy Awards.

The fiction category includes works by Uwem Akpan, Jeffery Renard Allen, Breena Clarke, Tananarive Due, James McBride and Jesmyn Ward. There are also poetry and nonfiction categories.

If you're at interested in what's being published in America by writers of African descent these days go take a look. You might discover a gem you'd otherwise have missed entirely!

The only one of these that I've read was James McBride's Song Yet Sung. I reviewed it for The Washington Post. Good book. I'm sure the others are too.

It's All Love

I'm very pleased to announce the publication of a new anthology. Now, this is me taking off my fantasist hat and stepping back to my earlier days as a writer of literary fiction - often with an African-American focus. That's exactly what this anthology features. It's called It's All Love: Black Writers on Soul Mates, Family and Friends, edited by Marita Golden.

Here's the jacket copy:

In It's All Love, Black writers celebrate the complexity, power, danger, and glory of love in all its many forms: romantic, familial, communal, and sacred. Editor Marita Golden recounts the morning she woke up certain that she would meet her soul mate in "My Own Happy Ending"; memoirist Reginald Dwayne Betts, in a piece he calls "Learning the Name Dad," writes stirringly about serving time in prison and how that transformed his life for the better; New York Times bestselling author Pearl Cleage is at her best in the delicate, touching "Missing You"; award-winning author David Anthony Durham enraptures readers with his 'An Act of Faith"; New York Times bestselling author L. A. Banks is both funny and wise in her beautiful essay on discovering love as a child, "Two Cents and a Question." And the poetry of love is here, too - from Gwendolyn Brooks's classic "Black Wedding Song" to works by Nikki Giovanni, E. Ethelbert Miller, and Kwame Alexander. It's All Love is a dazzling, delightfully diverse exploration of the wonderful gift of love.

I'm very happy to be included. My story, by the way, was inspired by some tales my mother told me about meeting my father. It's not their story, but it's a fiction prompted by a few elements of their story. Because of that it's quite important to me. Also, the publication is a fundraiser for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation. May it raise much funds!