Sunday, April 10, 2016

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.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

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

Henry Holt and Company
Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America

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