Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, 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 over 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which she was awarded for her novel The Color Purple. Over the span of her career, Walker has published seventeen novels and short story collections, twelve non-fiction works, and collections of essays and poetry.
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to win the prize twice. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
A literary award or literary prize is an award presented in recognition of a particularly lauded literary piece or body of work. It is normally presented to an author.
David Anthony Durham is an American novelist, author of historical fiction and fantasy.
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.
Kim Roberts is an American poet, editor, and literary historian who lives in Washington, D.C.
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.
Jeffery Renard Allen is an American poet, essayist, short story writer and novelist. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits and Stellar Places, and four works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back, the story collection Holding Pattern a second novel, Song of the Shank, and his most recent book, the short story collection “Fat Time and Other Stories”. He is also the co-author with Leon Ford of “An Unspeakble Hope: Brutality, Forgiveness, and Building A Better Future for My Son”.
Valerie Boyd was an American writer and academic. She was best known for her biography of Zora Neale Hurston entitled Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. She was an associate professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, where she taught narrative nonfiction writing, as well as arts and literary journalism.
Dust Tracks on a Road is the 1942 autobiography of black American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.
Zelda Lockhart is a contemporary African-American writer, speaker, teacher and researcher. Her latest novel is https://www.harpercollins.com/products/trinity-zelda-lockhart?variant=40902291947554 July 2023 release. She is the director of https://lavensonpressstudios.com/ and https://herstorygardenstudios.com/. Her recent books include Diamond Doris: The True Story of the World’s Most Notorious Jewel Thief by Doris Payne with Zelda Lockhart (2019), and https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Full-Length-Manuscript-Turning-Literary/dp/0978910265 (2017). She is the author of three novels: Fifth Born (2003), https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Running-Creek-Zelda-Lockhart/dp/0978910206/ref=sr_1_1?crid=81W2DY4E4FAU&keywords=cold+running+creek&qid=1683822245&s=books&sprefix=cold+running+creek%2Cstripbooks%2C96&sr=1-1 (2006), and https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Born-II-Hundredth-Turtle/dp/0978910249 (2010). Her first novel was published to critical acclaim and was a finalist for an award—for a debut novel—from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Foundation. Her novels emphasize the struggles, sexual trauma, and triumphs of African and Native American women historically and contemporarily. Her research focuses on inquiries into intergenerational healing and the ways creating personal experience-based literature while consuming personal experience-based literature has the potential to be emotionally, psychologically, and socially transformative for individuals. Areas of interest are Black women and girls, Native populations, people of color, LGBT individuals and financially disenfranchised people. In her position as director of LaVenson Press and Her Story Garden Studios, Lockhart seeks to create a space where women can "self-define through writing and publishing." She is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literature at North Carolina Central University
Angela Flournoy is an American writer. Her debut novel The Turner House (2015) won the First Novelist Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book of 2015. She was also listed on the National Book Awards' 5 under 35 list, nominated by her former teacher ZZ Packer.
The Calabash International Literary Festival, inaugurated in Jamaica in 2001, is a three-day festival that was held annually for its first decade, before being staged on a biennial basis on even years, until 2018. With the 2020 and 2022 festivals having to be cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, 2023 is scheduled to mark the festival's return for its 15th staging. The scope of Calabash encompasses "readings and music with other forms of storytelling folded in the mix".
Mitchell S. Jackson is an American writer. He is the author of the 2013 novel The Residue Years, as well as Oversoul (2012), an ebook collection of essays and short stories. Jackson is a Whiting Award recipient and a former winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In 2021, while an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for his profile of Ahmaud Arbery for Runner's World. As of 2021, Jackson is the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
Bernice L. McFadden is an American novelist. She has also written humorous erotica under the pseudonym Geneva Holliday. Author of fifteen novels, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Marc Anthony Richardson is an American novelist and artist. He won an American Book Award and a Creative Capital Award.
Rivers Solomon is an American author of speculative and literary fiction. In 2018, they received the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firecracker Award in Fiction for their debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, and in 2020 their second novel, The Deep, won the Lambda Literary Award. Their third novel, Sorrowland, was published in May 2021, and won the Otherwise Award.
Naomi Jackson is an American author most known for her novel The Star Side of Bird Hill, which was nominated for the NAACP Image Award. She is a Fulbright recipient, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
