Members | Jodi-Ann Francis Retha Powers Emily Raboteau Felice Neals Yahdon Israel Norval Soleyn Gordon E. Thompson David Unger Linda Villarosa Charles Frye |
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Director of the Langston Hughes Festival | Vanessa K. Valdes |
English Department Chair | Elizabeth Mazzola |
Dean of Humanities and Arts | Erec Koch |
President of the College | Vincent Boudreau |
Parent organization | The City College of New York |
The Langston Hughes Medal has been awarded annually by the Langston Hughes Festival of the City College of New York since 1978. The medal "is awarded to highly distinguished writers from throughout the African American diaspora for their impressive works of poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography and critical essays that help to celebrate the memory and tradition of Langston Hughes. Each year, the LHF’s Advisory Committee reviews the work of major black writers from Africa to America whose work is accessed as likely having a lasting impact on world literature.". [1]
Recipients of the Langston Hughes medallion [2] are:
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction author and a multiple recipient of the Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
Walter Ellis Mosley is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California; they are perhaps his most popular works. In 2020, Mosley received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, making him the first Black man to receive the honor.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. As of the fall of 2023, she will be the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Ntozake Shange was an American playwright and poet. As a Black feminist, she addressed issues relating to race and Black power in much of her work. She is best known for her Obie Award-winning play, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1975). She also penned novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Liliane (1994), and Betsey Brown (1985), about an African-American girl run away from home.
The City College of the City University of New York is a public research university within the City University of New York (CUNY) system in New York City. Founded in 1847, City College was the first free public institution of higher education in the United States. It is the oldest of CUNY's 25 institutions of higher learning and is considered its flagship college.
The National Black Writers Conference (NBWC) is presented by the Center for Black Literature (CBL) at Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York. Founded by Dr. Brenda M. Greene, the Center for Black Literature was officially approved by the College Council of Medgar Evers College and by the board of trustees in October 2002. Its mission is to expand, broaden, and enrich the public's knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of literature produced by people of the African diaspora. It accomplishes its mission through a variety of programs and partnerships and by serving as a forum for the discussion, reading, research, study, and critical analysis of Black literature. It is the only center devoted to this mission in the country.
Akasha Gloria Hull is an American poet, educator, writer, and critic whose work in African-American literature and as a Black feminist activist has helped shape Women's Studies. As one of the architects of Black Women's Studies, her scholarship and activism has increased the prestige, legitimacy, respect, and popularity of feminism and African-American studies.
The St. Louis Literary Award has been presented yearly since 1967 to a distinguished figure in literature. It is sponsored by the Saint Louis University Library Associates.
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."
The New York State Writers Hall of Fame or NYS Writers Hall of Fame is a project established in 2010 by the Empire State Center for the Book, which is the New York State affiliate of the U.S. Library of Congress's Center for the Book, and the Empire State Book Festival. Beginning in 2020, the Empire State Center for the Book partners with the New York State Writers Institute in presenting the awards.
Thulani Davis is an American playwright, journalist, librettist, novelist, poet, and screenwriter. She is a graduate of Barnard College and attended graduate school at both the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.
Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present is a compilation of orature and literature by more than 200 women from Africa and the African diaspora, edited and introduced by Margaret Busby, who compared the process of assembling the volume to "trying to catch a flowing river in a calabash".
Michael Oreskes is an American journalist who worked at the New York Daily News and for 20 years at The New York Times. Oreskes later became the vice president and senior managing editor at the Associated Press before joining NPR as senior vice president of news and editorial director in 2015. Oreskes was ousted in 2017 amid allegations of sexual harassment.
Vanessa K. Valdés is an author, educator, writer, editor, historian, and associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the City College of New York. She is a Puerto Rican of African descent. She is the author of Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Schomburg was one of the founding fathers of Black History in North America, and the father of the Global African Diaspora. She has also written Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas. In Oshun's Daughters she examines African Diasporic sense of womanhood, examining novels, poems, etc., written by Diaspora women from the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Writings that show how these women use traditional Yoruba religion as alternative models for their womanhood differing from western concepts of being a woman.
Brenda M. Greene, is an American scholar, author, literary activist, and radio host at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. Greene is also the founder and executive director of the Center for Black Literature, the director of the National Black Writers Conference, and the former chair of the English department at Medgar Evers College. Prior to her work in the academy, Greene also worked as an educator in the New York City Public School system, and with civic and political organizations, to enrich and engage the community-at-large. Since 2004, she has served as a radio host on WNYE radio, connecting listeners to some of today's most accomplished writers. She is the former board chair of the Nkiru Center for Education and Culture, co-founded by hip hop icons Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli.
Helga Davis is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist who works as an actress, singer, writer and composer, as well as a radio and podcast host.
The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation is an American literary nonprofit organization that supports the development and careers of Black writers. The Foundation provides classes, workshops, an annual conference, and offers the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the North Star Award, among others. Writer Marita Golden and cultural historian Clyde McElvene founded the organization in 1990.