Saturday, September 7, 2024

Please join us for the 2024 Lillian Smith Book Award Ceremony, October 3, 2024.

 


The Georgia Center for the Book  

DeKalb Public Library


About the Event

Join us for the 2024 Lillian Smith Book Awards Ceremony, which will be held on October 3rd, 2024, at 7 p.m. ET in the Decatur Library Auditorium. This free event includes remarks from both recipients and a Q&A followed by a book signing. The Lillian Smith Book Awards are sponsored by the Southern Regional Council, University of Georgia Libraries, DeKalb County Public Library/The Georgia Center for the Book, and Piedmont College. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested.

The LSBA committee is proud to award the 2024 Lillian Smith Book Award to:

SUSAN CRAWFORD for Charleston: Race, Water, and The Coming Storm

and

VICTOR LUCKERSON for Built From the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street

About the Winners:

“In their books, Susan Crawford and Victor Luckerson illustrate not only past actions of racial injustice but also the generational impacts that continue to shape the communities of Charleston and Tulsa,” said Katherine Stein, interim associate university librarian for special collections and director of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which administers the award. “We look forward to recognizing these exceptional storytellers at the 2024 Lillian Smith Book Awards ceremony in October.”

In Charleston, Susan Crawford, a law professor, author, and technology expert, weaves together science, historical narratives, and personal stories of Black Charlestonians in her case study at the intersection of climate change and racial injustice in the coastal South Carolina city. The book grapples with the historical and present-day abuses of power that have shaped Charleston and offers a vision for a more equitable and resilient future, emphasizing the need for immediate, inclusive planning and climate justice.

Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor at Harvard Law School. She served as Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy in 2009 and co-led the FCC transition between the Bush and Obama administrations. Her accolades include being named one of Politico’s 50 Thinkers, Doers, and Visionaries Transforming Politics in 2015, one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology in 2009, and one of TIME Magazine’s Tech 40: The Most Influential Minds in Tech in 2013.

In Built from the Fire, Victor Luckerson delves into the legacy of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, which continues to impact the city’s Black community more than a century later. The book traces the history of the Greenwood community from a beacon of Black entrepreneurial success during the Jim Crow era through the violent massacre, which began with a false accusation against a Black teenager and led to the destruction of more than 1,200 homes and nearly every business in Greenwood, and into the present day. Prominent figures like Loula Williams, a successful businesswoman, and the Goodwin family, whose descendants continue to play a significant role in Greenwood, are central to Luckerson’s narrative. The book documents Greenwood’s history post-massacre, emphasizing the persistent challenges of white supremacy, class stratification, and governmental neglect. 

Luckerson, a journalist from Montgomery, Alabama, is the University of Tulsa’s writer in residence for 2023-2024. In addition to sharing his research and insights with students on campus, Luckerson is collaborating with the College of Law’s Buck Colbert Franklin Legal Clinic to investigate lawsuits filed by Greenwood property owners in the aftermath of the massacre. He has written for esteemed publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, TIME Magazine, and Smithsonian magazine.

About the Award:

The Southern Regional Council established the Lillian Smith Award shortly after Smith's death in 1966. Internationally acclaimed author of the controversial novel, Strange Fruit (1944), Lillian Smith was the most liberal and outspoken of white, mid-twentieth century Southern writers on issues of social and racial injustice. When other Southern liberals were charting a cautious course on racial change, Smith boldly and persistently called for an end to segregation. For such boldness, she was often scorned by more moderate southerners, threatened by arsonists, and denied the critical attention she deserved as a writer. Yet she continued to write and speak for improved human relations and social justice throughout her life.

Selected by a panel of judges, nominated books represent outstanding creative achievements worthy of recognition because of their literary merit, moral vision, and honest representation of the South, its people, problems, and promises. The Lillian Smith Book Awards honors those authors who, through their writing, carry on Smith's legacy of elucidating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding that represents the ideals of a racially just society.

The 2024 winners will receive a specially-designed, glass trophy bearing the embossed Lillian Smith Book Award logo. The award was designed by Nate Nardi of Decatur Glassblowing, and the logo was designed by Jerri Wilson of the DeKalb County Public Library.

Learn more about the award here: https://www.libs.uga.edu/hargrett/lillian-smith

Free General Admission

Sunday, July 21, 2024

88 Books Nominated for 2024 Lillian Smith Book Awards


The Southern Regional Council (SRC) recently announced that eighty-eight books have been nominated for the Lillian Smith Book Awards for 2024 to be presented at the Georgia Center for the Book on October 3, 2024.

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 2023 were Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Democracy by Tomiko Brown Nagin and Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on Health in America by Linda Villarosa. 

The 2024 nominated books are:




Title

Author

American Gun

Cameron McWhirter 

and Zusha Elinson

American Ramble

Neil King

American Whitelash

Wesley Lowery

America's Black Capital

Jeffrey Ogbar

An Inconvenient Cop

Edwin Raymond

Arguing for a Better World

Arianne Shahvisi

Banyan Moon

Thao Thai

Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights

Dylan C. Penningroth

Benjamin Banneker and Us: Eleven Generations of an American Family

Rachel Jamison Webster

Black and Queer on Campus

Michael P. Jefferies

Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

Maria Smilios

Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood, and Myth

Deborah DEEP Moulton

Black on Black

Daniel Black

Blue Hour: A Novel

Tiffany Clarke Harrison

Bone Doctor's Concerto

Dr. Alvin Crawford

Bruised Magnolias: New South, Old Politics

Leila Ryland Swain

Built From the Fire

Victor Luckerson

Campus to Counter: Civil Rights Activism in Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, 1960-1963

Brian Suttell

Charleston

Susan Crawford

Coach Prime

Jean-Jacques Taylor

Cogitatio: Shadow in the Wind

McKinley Aspen

Cost of Free Land

Rebecca Clarren

Coyote's Swing: A Memoir and Critique of Mental Hygiene in Native America

David Edward Walker

Dark Days: Fugitive Essays

Roger Reeves

Dear Department Chair: Letters from Black Women Leaders to the Next Generation

Stephanie Y Evans, S

tephanie Shonekan, 

Stephanie G Adams

Death of a Jaybird

Jodi M Savage

Decent People

De'Shawn Charles Winslow

Dirt Don't Burn: A Black Community's Struggle for Educational Equality Under Segregation

Larry Roeder 

& Barry Harrelson

Education of Kendrick Perkins

Kendrick Perkins 

with Seth Rogoff

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church

Christopher Alan Graham

False Starts

Casey Stockstill

Fever in the Heartland

Timothy Egan

Fire on the Levee

Jared Fishman 

and Joseph Hooper

Food, Power, Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement

Bobby J Smith II

Happiness Falls

Angie Kim

He/She/They: How We Talk About Gender and Why It Matters

Schuyler Bailar

Hijab Butch Blues

Lamya H

Homeward

Angela Jackson-Brown

Hope and Healing: Black Colleges and the Future of American Democracy

John Silvanus Wilson

Horse Barbie

Geena Rocero

I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction

Kidada E. Williams

Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism

Leigh Goodmark

In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning

Grace Elizabeth Hale

Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation's Capital

Dr Elizabeth Rule

Indigo Field

Marjorie Hudson

Injustice of Place

Kathryn J. Edin, 

H. Luke Shaefer, 

Timothy J. Nelson

Killing Closet

VL Brunskill

King: A Life

Jonathan Eig

Kneeling Man: My Father's Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr

Leta McCollough Seletzky

Learning from Birmingham: A Journey into History and Home

Julie Buckner Armstrong

"Let Us Go Free": Slavery and Jesuit Universities in America

C Walker Gollar

Life and Times of Hannah Crafts

Gregg Hecimovich

Life on Other Planets

Aomawa Shields

Majority

Elizabeth L Silver

Middle Daughter

Chika Unigwe

More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew

John Blake

Most Tolerant Little Town

Rachel Louise Martin

Necessary Trouble

Drew Gilpin Faust

Ordinary Notes

Christina Sharpe

Our Best Intentions

Vibhuti Jain

Our Migrant Souls

Hector Tobar

Path to Grace: Reimagining the Civil Rights Movement

Ethel Morgan Smith

Peach Seed

Anita Gail Jones

Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis

Sara Marcus

Promise

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Say Anarcha

JC Hallman

Saying It Loud

Mark Whitaker

Shielded

Joanna Schwartz

Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (2024)

John H. Cable

Stayed on Freedom

Dan Berger

Stealing

Margaret Verble

Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs: A Memoir of Uyghur Exile, Hope, and Survival

Gulchehra Hoja

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)

Sly Stone 

with Ben Greenman; 

Forward by Questlove

Those We Thought We Knew

David Joy

To Speak a Defiant Word (2022)

Pauli Murray

Unfortunates

JK Chuwku

Unloose My Heart: A Personal Reckoning with the Twisted Roots of by Southern Family Tree

Marcia Edwina 

Herman-Giddens

Unmasking the Klansman

Dan T Cater

Up Home

Ruth J. Simmons






War as I Saw It: In Rhodesia, Now Zimbabwe, Through the Eyes of a Black Boy

George Makonese Matuvi

We Were Once a Family

Roxanna Asgarian

What Napoleon Could Not Do

DK Nnuro

Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough

Dina Nayeri

Witness

Jamel Brinkley

Women of NOW

Katherine Turk

Wounded World

Chad L. Williams

Wreck

Cassandra Jackson

Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter

Patricia Foster