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