Introducing the Jurors for the 2017 Lillian Smith Book Awards

The Southern Regional Council (SRC), founded in 1919 to combat racial injustice, established the Lillian Smith Book Awards in 1966 to recognize writing which extends the legacy of the outspoken writer who challenged 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. Since 2007 this partnership has also included Georgia Center for the Book, and the awards ceremony is now presented on the Sunday of the Labor Day Weekend as part of the Decatur Book Festival in Decatur, Georgia. Excerpts from the 2008 - 2016 awards ceremonies may be viewed through by clicking on the images on the right side of this page. The 2017 awards ceremony will be held at the DeKalb County Public Library in Decatur, Georgia on Sunday, September 3rd.

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 rejoining the jury this year is Merryl Penson, Executive Director of Library Services for the Georgia Board of Regents.

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-Six Books Nominated for 2017 Lillian Smith Book Award

The Southern Regional Council (SRC) recently announced that forty-six books have been nominated for the Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2017 to be presented in Decatur, Georgia on September 3, 2017.  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 2016 were Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow by Cheryl Knott and Aaron Henry of Mississippi: Inside Agitator by Minion K.C. Morrison.  The 2017 nominated books are:
Title	Author	Publisher
Jilo:  A Witching Savannah Novel	J.D. Horn	47North
American Happiness	Jacqueline Allen Trimble	NewSouth Books
Forsaken:  A Novel	Ross Howell Jr.	NewSouth Books
1976	Megan Volpert	Sibling Rivalry Press
The Courage of His Convictions:  A Novella	Rick Spier	Moon Donkey Press, LLC
Haylow:  A Novel	Gray Stewart	Livingston Press, University of West Alabama
The Distance to Home	Verne Jackson	Create Space
Jumping	Dana Wildsmith	Ink Brush Press
A Piece of my Mind:  American Stories	John Noltner	Self-published
The Cigar Factory:  A Novel of Charleston	Michele Moore (Author), Pat Conroy (Foreword)	University of South Carolina Press
Black Sheep Boy:  A Novel in Stories	Martin Pousson	Rare Bird Books
The Myth of Water:  Poems from the Life of Helen Keller	Jeanie Thompson	The University of Alabama Press
The Making of a Racist:  A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade	Charles B. Dew	University of Virginia Press
The End of Days:  African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation	Matthew Harper	University of North Carolina Press
Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood	Wilma Dykeman	University of North Carolina Press
A Chance for Change:  Head Start and Mississippi's Black Freedom Struggle	Crystal R. Sanders	University of North Carolina Press
­Beyond Integration:  The Black Freedom Struggle in Escambia County, Florida, 1960-1980	J. Michael Butler	University of North Carolina Press
Brown v. Board and the  Transformation of American Culture:  Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation	Ben Keppel	LSU Press
Bad Girls at Samarcand:  Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory	Karin L. Zipf	LSU Press
The Book of Isaias: A Child of Hispanic Immigrants Seeks His Own America	Daniel Connolly	St. Martin’s Press
They Can't Kill Us All:   Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement	Wesley Lowery	Little, Brown & Company
Honky Tonk Samurai:  A Hap and Leonard Novel	Joe R. Lansdale	Little, Brown & Company
Truevine:  Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest:  A True Story of the Jim Crow South	Beth Macy	Little, Brown & Company
Underground Airline	Ben H. Winters	Little, Brown & Company
Sing for Your Life:  A Story of Race, Music, and Family	Daniel Bergner	Little, Brown & Company

The Firebrand and the First Lady:  Portrait of a Friendship:  Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice	Patricia Bell-Scott	Alfred A. Knopf
The Summer That Melted Everything:  A Novel	Tiffany McDaniel	Macmillan, Imprint St. Martin’s Press
The Family Tree:  A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth	Karen Branan	Atria Books / Simon & Schuster
Rapture:  Poems	Sjohnna McCray	Graywolf Press
Wolf Boys:  Two American Teenagers and Mexico's Most Dangerous Drug Cartel	Dan Slater	Simon & Schuster
Hanging Bridge:  Racial Violence and America's Civil Rights Century	Jason Morgan Ward	Oxford University Press
Stamped from the Beginning:   The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America	Ibram X. Kendi	PublicAffairs
The Orphan Mother:  A Novel	Robert Hicks	Grand Central Publishing
Blood Brothers:  The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X	Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith	Basic Books
Boy Erased:  A Memoir	Garrard Conley	Riverhead Books
A Nation Without Borders:  The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910	Steven Hahn	Viking / Penguin Random House
White Trash:  The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America	Nancy Isenberg	Viking / Penguin Random House
A Pursued Justice:  Black Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights	Kenyatta R.  Gilbert	Baylor University Press
Lynched:  The Power of Memory in a Culture of Terror	Angela D. Sims	Baylor University Press
New Politics in the Old South:  Ernest F. Hollings in the Civil Rights Era	David T. Ballantyne	University of South Carolina Press
Vagrant Nation:  Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s	Risa Goluboff	Oxford University Press
University, Court, and Slave:  Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War	Alfred L. Brophy	Oxford University Press