Introducing the Jurors for the 2016 Lillian Smith Book Awards

This year’s Lillian Smith jury is chaired by Mary A. Twining, Emeritus Professor of English and Folklore at Clark Atlanta University.  Noted for her study of the Sea Island Communities of Georgia and South Carolina and their cultural ties to West African, her published work has included Sea Island Roots: African Presence in the Carolinas and Georgia, edited with Keith E. Baird (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press 1991); Names and Naming in the Sea Islands, a contribution to the Crucible of Carolina: Essays in the Development of Gullah Language and Culture, edited by Michael Montgomery and Louise Ferrell, University of Georgia Press, 1994; The New Nomads, Art, Life, and Lure of Migrant workers in New York State, published in The Journal of the New York Folklore Society 1987; and numerous contributions to the Journal of Black Studies.

James Taylor has managed the Atlanta Fulton Public Library’s Buckhead Branch and hosted the System’s Writers in Focus, “a meet-the-author” television show produced by Fulton County Television (FGTV) .  He previously managed the Library Express Department, the Circulation Department, and the Ivan Allen Reference Department.

Also serving on the jury this year is Chana Kai Lee, Associate professor of History at the University of Georgia and author of For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer.

Earl Picard holds degrees in political science from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), where he specialized in comparative politics and the politics of developing countries. Since 1985 he has pursued a career in international development, serving stints with the Institute of International Education (IIE) in Zimbabwe (1985-88) and South Africa (1997-99). He has organized and managed training programs for professionals from the Philippines, Kazakistan, Usbekistan, Russia, Ukraine, Haiti, El Salvador, Burundi and Guinea. He has secured and managed USAID development assistance contracts in Nepal, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Egypt, Rwanda, South Africa and Benin and directed a technical assistance and training project in Zambia and a capacity building project in Ghana. He has worked as a consultant to a number of national and international organizations. Most recently, Picard has directed the Program Development and Management unit at Georgia State University.

E. Delores Stephens is a Professor of English at Morehouse College, where she teaches World Literature, Shakespeare, and British literature survey courses.  Her areas of scholarship and research include women's fiction, Caribbean literature, and biography.

Forty-Five Books Nominated for Lillian Smith Book Award for 2016

The Southern Regional Council (SRC) recently announced that forty-five books have been nominated for the Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2016 to be presented in Decatur, Georgia on September 4, 2016. 

SRC was founded in 1919 to combat racial injustice in the South. SRC initiated the Lillian Smith Book Awards shortly after Smith's death in 1966 to recognize authors whose writing extends the legacy of the outspoken writer, educator and social critic who challenged her fellow Southerners and all Americans on issues of social and racial justice. Since 2004 the awards have been presented by SRC in a partnership with the University of Georgia Libraries, whose Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses a historic collection of Lillian Smith's letters and manuscripts. The Georgia Center for the Book became a partner in 2007, when the awards ceremony first became part of the Decatur Book Festival.  Piedmont College, which operates the Lillian Smith Center, became a partner in 2015. 

The award recipients for 2015 were Strong Inside by Andrew Maranis and Looking Back Moving Forward by Lee Formwalt. 

The 2016 nominated books are:

BOOK TITLE	AUTHOR	PUBLISHER
American Evita: Lurleen Wallace	Janice Law	Eakin Press
The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball's Lost Triumph	Scott Ellsworth	Little, Brown and Company
Stars for Freedom: Hollywood, Black Celebrities, and the Civil Rights Movement	Emilie Raymond	University of Washington Press
My Sweet Vidalia	Deborah Mantella	Turner Publishing
Slouching Toward Tyranny: Mass Incarceration, Death Sentences and Racism	Joseph B. Ingle	Algora Publishing
Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II	Richard Reeves	Henry Holt and Company
Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America	Ari Berman	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Race and Education in North Carolina:  From Segregation to Desegregation	John E. Batchelor	LSU Press
Jim Crow's Last Stand: Nonunanimous Criminal Jury Verdicts in Louisiana	Thomas Aiello	LSU Press
South of Everything: A Novel	Audrey Taylor Gonzalez	She Writes Press
Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series	Leah Dickerman and Elsa Smithgall	The Museum of Modern Art
Aaron Henry of Mississippi: Inside Agitator	Minion K. C. Morrison	University of Arkansas Press
Found Anew: Poetry and Prose Inspired by the South Caroliniana Library Digital Collections	Edited by R. Mac Jones and Ray McManus	University of South Carolina Press
Witness to Change: From Jim Crow to Political Empowerment	Sybil Haydel Morial	John F. Blair, Publisher
The Class of '65: A Student, a Divided Town, and the Long Road to Forgiveness	Jim Auchmutey	PublicAffairs Books
The Pinch: A History A Novel	Steve Stern	Graywolf Press
A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction	Patrick J. Kennedy and Stephen Fried	Blue Rider Press
All the Rage: A Novel	Courtney Summers	St. Martin’s Griffin
Summer of the Oak Moon	Laura Templeton	Month9Books
At the Cross: Race, Religion, and Citizenship in the Politics of the Death Penalty	Melynda J. Price	Oxford University Press
Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society	Joseph T. Reiff	Oxford University Press
An Evil Day in Georgia: The Killing of Coleman Osborn and the Death Penalty in the Progressive-Era South	Robert Neil Smith	University of Tennessee Press
Unlikely Dissenters: White Southern Women in the Fight for Racial Justice, 1920–1970	Anne Stefani	University Press of Florida
The Sounds of Latinidad: Immigrants Making Music and Creating Culture in a Southern City	Samuel K. Byrd	NYU Press
Anti-Black Violence in Twentieth-Century Texas	Edited by Bruce A. Glasrud	Texas A&M University Press
Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow	Cheryl Knott	University of Massachusetts Press
The Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, A Play, and the City That Would Not Be Broken	Wendell Pierce with Rod Dreher	Riverhead Books
Katrina: After the Flood	Gary Rivlin	Simon & Schuster
The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle	Lillian Faderman	Simon & Schuster
God Help the Child:  A Novel	Toni Morrison	Penguin Random House
Ordinary Light: A Memoir	Tracy K. Smith	Penguin Random House
Negroland: A Memoir	Margo Jefferson	Penguin Random House
The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball's Lost Triumph	Scott Ellsworth	Little, Brown and Company
My Journey with Maya	Tavis Smiley with David Ritz	Little, Brown and Company
Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence	Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay	University of North Carolina Press
The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi	Stephen A. Berrey	University of North Carolina Press
Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South	Charles L. Hughes	University of North Carolina Press
Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights	Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett	University of North Carolina Press
Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical	Sherie M. Randolph	University of North Carolina Press
The Short Life of Free Georgia: Class and Slavery in the Colonial South	Noeleen McIlvenna	University of North Carolina Press
Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South	Talitha L. LeFlouria	University of North Carolina Press
Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans	LaKisha Michelle Simmons	University of North Carolina Press
Charleston in Black and White: Race and Power in the South after the Civil Rights Movement	Steve Estes	University of North Carolina Press
A Boy from Georgia: Coming of Age in the Segregated South	Hamilton Jordan	University of Georgia Press
To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South	Angela Jill Cooley	University of Georgia Press