Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was a Spanish explorer of the New World, and one of four survivors of the 1527 Narváez expedition. During eight years of traveling across what is now the US Southwest, he became a trader and faith healer to various Native American tribes before reconnecting with Spanish civilization in Mexico in 1536. After returning to Spain in 1537, he wrote an account, first published in 1542 as La relación y comentarios, which in later editions was retitled Naufragios y comentarios. Cabeza de Vaca is sometimes considered a proto-anthropologist for his detailed accounts of the many tribes of Native Americans that he encountered.
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. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Pánfilo de Narváez was a Spanish conquistador and soldier in the Americas. Born in Spain, he first embarked to the island of Jamaica in 1510 as a soldier. He came to participate in the conquest of Cuba and led an expedition to Camagüey escorting Bartolomé de las Casas.
The Narváez expedition was a Spanish expedition started in 1527 that was intended to explore Florida and establish colonial settlements. The expedition was initially led by Pánfilo de Narváez, who died in 1528. Many more people died as the expedition traveled west along the explored Gulf Coast of the present-day United States and into the American southwest. Only four of the expedition's original members survived, reaching Mexico City in 1536. These survivors were the first known non-Native Americans to see the Mississippi River, and to cross the Gulf of Mexico and Texas.
Estevanico, also known as Esteban de Dorantes and Estevanico the Moor, was the first person of African descent to explore North America. Little is known about his background but contemporary accounts described him as a "negro alárabe" or "Arabic-speaking black man" native to Azemmour, Morocco. In 1522, he was sold as a slave to the Spanish nobleman Andrés Dorantes de Carranza in the Portuguese-controlled Moroccan town of Azemmour.
Adam Haslett is an American fiction writer and journalist. His debut short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel, Imagine Me Gone, were both finalists for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017, he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
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.
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005) is the debut book by Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami. It has been described as a novel, and as a linked series of short stories or fictional portraits. First published in the United States, the connected stories explore the extensive immigration from North Africa to Europe through the lives of four Moroccan characters: two men and two women.
Mohammed V University is a public university in Rabat, Morocco. It was founded in 1957 under a royal decree (Dahir). It is the first modern university in Morocco after the University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez. It is named after Mohammed V of Morocco.
Harold Augenbraum is an American writer, editor, and translator. He is the former Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, and former member of the Board of Trustees of the Asian American Writers Workshop, and former vice chair of the New York Council for the Humanities. Before taking up his position at the National Book Foundation in November 2004, for fifteen years Augenbraum was Director of The Mercantile Library of New York, where he established the Center for World Literature, the New York Festival of Mystery, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Proust Society of America. He has been awarded eight grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, received a Raven Award from the Mystery Writers of America for distinguished service to the mystery field, and coordinated the national celebration of the John Steinbeck Centennial. He is on the advisory board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College. In 2016, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. He is co-founder, with Alice Kaplan, of the Yale Translation Initiative at Yale University, where he is Associate Director, and from 2017 to 2019 was Acting Editor of The Yale Review.
The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), also known as "the Arabic Booker," is regarded as the most prestigious and important literary prize in the Arab world.
The David J. Langum Sr. Prizes are American literary awards for historical fiction, biography, and legal history. They have been awarded annually since 2001 by the Langum Charitable Trust.
The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes were awarded on April 16, 2012, by the Pulitzer Prize Board for work during the 2011 calendar year. The deadline for submitting entries was January 25, 2012. For the first time, all entries for journalism were required to be submitted electronically. In addition, the criteria for the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting has been revised to focus on real-time reporting of breaking news. For the eleventh time in Pulitzer's history, no book received the Fiction Prize.
Alonso del Castillo Maldonado was an early Spanish explorer in the Americas. He was one of the last four survivors of the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition, along with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza and his African slave Estevanico. They were the early non-native people to travel and be enslaved in the Southwest region of the modern United States. Castillo Maldonado lived with a Native American tribe in Texas in 1527 and 1528.
Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, was an early Spanish explorer in the Americas. He was one of the four last survivors of the Narváez expedition, along with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes' slave Estevanico, and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado.
Secret Son is the 2009 novel by Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami. The novel is a bildungsroman that follows its main character, a Muslim youth named Youssef El Mekki, as he comes of age in the Casablanca slums.
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.
The Nickel Boys is a 2019 novel by American novelist Colson Whitehead. It is based on the historic Dozier School, a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and was revealed as highly abusive. A university investigation found numerous unmarked graves for unrecorded deaths and a history into the late 20th century of emotional and physical abuse of students.
The Other Americans is a mystery novel written by Moroccan American novelist Laila Lalami. The novel was published in 2019 by Pantheon Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
