All Aunt Hagar's Children (2006) is a collection of short stories by African-American author Edward P. Jones; it was his first book after winning the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for The Known World. The collection of 14 stories centers on African Americans in Washington D.C. during the 20th century. The stories can be broken down by how the characters suffer burdens from families, society, and themselves.[1] "Each story traces a journey--planned or unplanned, taken or failed--and an obvious root/route symbolism runs throughout the collection."[1] Jones is noted for writing long short stories and these are no exception, they are sometimes called "novelistic", characters are fully fleshed out.[1]
The stories of his first and third book are connected. As Neely Tucker says:
"There are 14 stories in "Lost," ordered from the youngest to the oldest character, and there are 14 stories in "Hagar's," also ordered from youngest to oldest character. The first story in the first book is connected to the first story in the second book, and so on. To get the full history of the characters, one must read the first story in each book, then go to the second story in each, and so on."[2]
All Aunt Hagar's Children won the 2007 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.[3] In 2024, it was ranked #70 on the New York Times list of best 100 books of the 21st century.[4]
Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, folklorist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a federal government project in the United States created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers and to develop a history and overview of the United States, by state, cities and other jurisdictions. It was launched in 1935 during the Great Depression. It was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. It was one of a group of New Deal arts programs known collectively as Federal Project Number One or Federal One.
Edward Paul Jones is an American novelist and short story writer. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award for his 2003 novel, The Known World.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Percival Everett is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has described himself as "pathologically ironic" and has played around with numerous genres such as western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire and philosophical fiction. His books are often satirical, aimed at exploring race and identity issues in the United States.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Mat Johnson is an American fiction writer who works in both prose and the comics format. In 2007, he was named the first USA James Baldwin Fellow by United States Artists.
The Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards program in the United States honors published Black writers worldwide for literary achievement. Introduced in 2001, the Legacy Award was the first national award presented to Black writers by a national organization of Black writers. It is granted for fiction, nonfiction and poetry, selected in a juried competition.
Tayari Jones is an American author and academic known for An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently a member of the English faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, and recently returned to her hometown of Atlanta after a decade in New York City. Jones was Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-large at Cornell University before becoming Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
Tracy Price-Thompson is an American speaker, novelist, editor, and retired United States Army Engineer Officer. She is a decorated veteran of the Gulf War.
Marita Golden is an American novelist, nonfiction writer, professor, and co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, a national organization that serves as a resource center for African-American writers.
Nancy Rawles is an American playwright, novelist, and teacher. She is a 2006 recipient of the Alex Award.
Doreen Baingana is a Ugandan writer. Her short story collection, Tropical Fish, won the Grace Paley Award for Short Fiction in 2003 and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book, Africa Region in 2006. Stories in it were finalists for the Caine Prize in 2004 and 2005. She was a Caine Prize finalist for the third time in 2021 and has received many other awards listed below.
Tiphanie Yanique from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, is a Caribbean American fiction writer, poet and essayist who lives in New York. In 2010 the National Book Foundation named her a "5 Under 35" honoree. She also teaches creative writing, currently based at Emory University.
Lost in the City is a 1992 collection of short stories about African-American life in Washington, D.C., by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward P. Jones.
Say You're One of Them (2008) is the debut book by Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan. First published in English in the United Kingdom and United States, it is a collection of five stories or novellas, each featuring children at risk and set in a different African country.
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" is a non-fiction work by Zora Neale Hurston. It is based on her interviews in 1927 with Oluale Kossola who was presumed to be the last survivor of the Middle Passage. Two female survivors were subsequently recognized but Cudjoe continued to be identified as the last living person with clear memories of life in Africa before passage and enslavement.
Yvvette Edwards FRSL is a British novelist born in London, England, of Caribbean heritage. Her first novel, A Cupboard Full of Coats, was published in 2011 to much acclaim and prize nominations that included the Man Booker Prize longlist and the Commonwealth Book Prize shortlist. Edwards followed this debut work five years later with The Mother (2016), a novel that "reinforces her accomplishment". She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Kyle Dargan is an American writer and editor. He is the author of six poetry collections. Dargan is currently an associate professor of literature and the assistant director of creative writing at American University, as well as Books Editor for the Wondaland Arts Society.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is an American poet, novelist, photographer and visual artist, who is the author of five published collections of poems. In Seeing the Body (2020), she "pairs poetry with photography, exploring memory, Black womanhood, the American landscape, and rebirth." It was a nominee for the 2021 NAACP Image Award in Poetry.
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