southernchanges

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

Sunday, April 21, 2024

Presenting the Jurors for the 2024 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 th e Book. Since 2016, this partnership has included Piedmont College, which operates the Lillian Smith Center in Clayton, Georgia. Excerpts from recent awards ceremonies may be viewed through by clicking on the images on the right side of this page. T 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.

Also joining the jury again this year is Minion K. C. Morrison, Professor of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware. Having previously served as Head of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Mississippi State University, Morrison's research and publications have appeared in the fields of comparative and American politics and administration. His publications include several books: African Americans and Political Participation (2003); Black Political Mobilization, Leadership and Power (1987); Housing and Urban Poor in Africa (1982), edited with Peter Gutkind; and Ethnicity and Political Integration (1982). He received a Lillian Smith Book Award in 2016 for his book Aaron Henry of Mississippi: Inside Agitator.

Melvin N. Johnson previously served as President and Professor of Economics at Tennessee State University, Nashville, Tennessee. He previously served as Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at Winston-Salem State University; Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, CIO, Interim Dean and Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Business Administration at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University; Special Lecturer on Business and Economic Policy at the University of Maryland; and Assistant Professor of Economics at the United States Air Force Academy.

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.

The 2024 Lillian Smith Book Awards will be presented at the Decatur Public Library on October 3, 2024.

Friday, August 25, 2023

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."