2023 Lillian Smith Book Award Recipients Announced

Atlanta - Two exceptional books will be recognized with this year's Lillian Smith Book Awards. These awards were established by the Southern Regional Council (SRC) to recognize authors whose books represent outstanding achievements demonstrating through high literary merit and moral vision an honest representation of the South, its people, its problems, and its promise.

This year's Awards Ceremony is a partnership between the Southern Regional Council, the University of Georgia Libraries, Piedmont College, and the Georgia Center for the Book. It will be presented  at the DeKalb County Public Library in Decatur, Georgia on Thursday, September 21, 2023 at 7:00 p.m.

The 2023 Award Recipients are:

TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN, Dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and Professor of History at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, she was appointed chair of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, and of the American Law Institute, and a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Her previous book, Courage to Dissent won the Bancroft Prize in 2011. She frequently appears as a commentator in media.

Photo:Rose Lincoln Photography 2021

LINDA VILLAROSA, a journalism professor at the City University of New York and a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, where she covers the intersection of race and health. She has also served as executive editor at Essence and as a science editor at The New York Times. Her article on maternal and infant mortality was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. She is a contributor to The 1619 Project.

 WINNING BOOKS:

 

  

"Civil Rights Queen captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions–how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America."

 

 

 

 

"In 2018, Linda Villarosa’s New York Times Magazine article on maternal and infant mortality among black mothers and babies in America caused an awakening. Hundreds of studies had previously established a link between racial discrimination and the health of Black Americans, with little progress toward solutions. But Villarosa’s article exposing that a Black woman with a college education is as likely to die or nearly die in childbirth as a white woman with an eighth grade education made racial disparities in health care impossible to ignore.

"Now, in Under the Skin, Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health-care system and in American society that cause Black people to “live sicker and die quicker” compared to their white counterparts. Today’s medical texts and instruments still carry fallacious slavery-era assumptions that Black bodies are fundamentally different from white bodies. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely. Anchored by unforgettable human stories and offering incontrovertible proof, Under the Skin is dramatic, tragic, and necessary reading."

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson Receives Lillian Smith Book Award for 2022

 Jocelyn Nicole Johnson received a Lillian Smith Book Award in 2022 for her book "My Monticello."

 

 

Mia Bay Receives Lillian Smith Book Award for 2022

Mia Bay received a Lillian Smith Book Award in 2022 for her book "Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance."

 

Lillian Smith Book Award Ceremony for 2022

Eighty Books Nominated for Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2023

 

The Southern Regional Council (SRC) recently announced that eighty books have been nominated for the Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2023 to be presented at the Georgia Center for the Book on September 21, 2023.

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 2022 were Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance by Mia Bay and  My Monticello  by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson.

The 2023 nominated books are:

 

Title	Author	Publisher
Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School	Kendra James	Grand Central Publishing
Afternoons with Harper Lee	Wayne Flint	University of Georgia Press
Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place	Neema Avashia	West Virginia University Press
Arc of Truth: The Thinking of Martin Luther King Jr.	Lewis V. Baldwin	Fortress Press
Behind the Big House: Reconciling Slavery, Race, and Heritage in the US South	Jodi Skipper	University of Iowa Press
Bertha Maxwell-Roddey and the Power of Black Leadership	Sonya Y. Ramsey	University Press of Florida
Beyond Innocence: The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt	Phoebe Zerwick	Grove Atlantic
Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life	Elijah Anderson	The University of Chicago Press
Black Side of the River: Race, Language, and Belonging in Washington, DC	Jessi Grieser	Georgetown University Press
Black Swim	Nicholas Goodly	Copper Canyon Press
Blacks and Jews in America	Terrence L. Johnson and Jacques Berlinerblau	Georgetown University Press
Bodies Out of Place: Theorizing Anti-Blackness in US Society	Barbara Harris Combs	University of Georgia Press
Boy We Made: A Memoir	Taylor Harris	Catapult
Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood	DaMaris B. Hill	Bloosmbury US
Brother Sleep	Aldo Amparan	Alice James Books
Child: A Memoir	Judy Goldman	University of South Carolina Press
Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality	Tomiko Brown-Nagin	Pantheon Books
Civil War By Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Right for Democracy	Jeremi Suri	PublicAffairs
Combating Hate: A Framework for Direct Action	Billie Murray	Penn State University Press
Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance	Torin Monahan	Duke University Press
Diaries of a Terrorist	Christopher Soto	Copper Canyon Press
Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America	Psyche A. Williams-Forson	University of North Carolina Press
Education of Betsey Stockton: An Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom	Gregory Nobles	The University of Chicago Press
Enslaved: The Sunken History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade	Simcha Jacobovici and Sean Kingsley	Pegasus Books
Fear of Black Consciousness	Lewis R. Gordon	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality	Elisabeth Griffith	Pegasus Books
Free	Lauren Kessler	Sourcebooks
Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment	Christina Greene	University of North Carolina Press
Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State	Farah Godrej	Oxford University Press
Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power	Jefferson Cowie	Basic Books
Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain's Most Terrifying Prison	Nicholas Guyatt	Basic Books
High Price of Freeways	Judy Juanita	Livingston Press
How To Survive an Apocalypse: Poems	Jacqueline Trimble	University of Georgia Press
I Kissed Shara Wheeler	Casey McQuiston	St. Martin's Press
Kingdoms of Savannah	George Dawes Green	Celadon Books
Last Summer on State Street	Tonya Wolfe	William Morrow
Legacy of Slavery at Harvard	The Presidential Committee on the Legacy of Slavery	Harvard University Press
Legacy of Violence	Caroline Elkins	Alfred A. Knopf
Letters to Martin	Randal Jelks	Chicago Review Press
Lynching in Port Jervis	Philip Dray	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
McMullen Circle	Heather Newton	Regal House Publishing
Mother Country	Jacinda Townsend	Graywolf Press
My Faith in the Constitution is Whole: Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scripture	Robin L. Owens	Georgetown University Press
My Seven Black Fathers	Will Jawando	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
No Choice: The Destruction of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect a Fundamental American Right	Becca Andrews	PublicAffairs
No Equal Justice	Peter J. Hammer and Edward J. Littlejohn	Wayne State University Press
None But the Righteous	Chantal James	Counterpoint
O.N. Pruitt's Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South	Berkley Hudson	University of North Carolina Press
On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Making of Gender Equality Law	Philippa Strum	University of Kansas
People's Plaza: Sixty-Two Days of Nonviolent Resistance	Justin Jones	Vanderbilt University Press
Postcard from the Delta	Michael Gaspeny	Livingston Press
Power: The Rise of Black Women in America	Charity C. Elder	Skyhorse Publishing
Praesidium - Shadows in the Wind Book 1	McKinley Aspen	Muse Literary
Real Americans: National Identity, Violence, and the Constitution	Jared A. Goldstein	University of Kansas
Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America	Gregory Smithers	Beacon Press
Redemptive Path Forward: From Incarceration to a Life of Activism	Antong Lucky	Counterpoint
Requiem for the Massacre: A Black History on the Conflict, Hope, and Fallout of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre	RJ Young	Counterpoint
Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama	Jennifer E. Brooks	LSU Press
Revolution by Law: The Federal Government and the Desegregation of Alabama Schools	Brian K. Landsberg	University of Kansas
Revolutionary: Samuel Adams	Stacy Schiff	Little, Brown and Company
Selena Didn't Know Spanish Either	Marisa Tirado	Texas Review Press
Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls	Kathleen Hale	Grove Atlantic
Smoking the Bible	Chris Abani	Copper Canyon Press
Solito: A Memoir	Javier Zamora	Hogarth (Random House)
Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South	Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd	University of Georgia Press
Southernization of America	Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker	NewSouth Books
Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina	June Manning Thomas	University of South Carolina Press
Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century	Peniel E. Joseph	Basic Books
Trayvon Generation	Elizabeth Alexander	Grand Central Publishing
True Biz	Sara Novic	Penguin Random House
Under the Skin	Linda Villarosa	Penguin Random House
Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas	Sam W. Haynes	Basic Books
Voice in the Wilderness: A pioneering Biologist Explains How Evolution Can Help Us Solve our Biggest Problems	Joseph L. Graves	Basic Books
Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse	Alora Young	Hogarth (Random House)
We Borrowed Gentleness	J. Estanislao Lopez	Alice James Books
What the Children Told Us	Tim Spofford	Sourcebooks
What The Eyes Can't See	Margaret Edds	University of South Carolina Press
Which Side Are You On	Ryan Lee Wong	Catapult
White Mosque	Sofia Samatar	Catapult
Yellow Dog Blues	Alice Faye Duncan	Eerdmans Books for Young Readers