A Chinese-American poet, a slavery historian, and a fictional take on the cultural world of reggae superstar Bob Marley are among the recipients of this year's Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. ideastream's David C. Barnett has more on the winners of a globally respected literary prize with roots in Cleveland.
Edith Anisfield-Wolf created the book award that bears her name in 1935 as a way to honor literature that sparks discussions on racism and diversity. Awards Manager Karen Long says, eighty years later, the prize continues to evolve with the times
KAREN LONG: Eighty is a great number, but it's a continuity of conversation. Our big news, structurally, is that we've added poetry as a category of its own.
The first winners in this new category are Jericho Brown and Marilyn Chin whose collections plum the emotional depths of race, and sexual identity.
Honoree Richard Dunn spent four decades researching the lives of three generations enslaved at two plantations, while historian David Brion Davis gets a Lifetime Achievement award for his three-volume probe of slavery in Western culture.
And Jamaican novelist Marlon James used the attempted assassination of reggae singer Bob Marley, to illuminate 1970’s Jamaica and the after effects of colonial rule on his country. James says his book is about a lot more than Marley.
MARLON JAMES: It's also about swapping one colonial master for another; it's shaking off the shackles of the past, and then putting on a new one".
Marlon James and the other winners of the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards will be honored this September in a downtown Cleveland ceremony.
The 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winners
In the language of the blues and the Bible, poet Jericho Brown crafts 40 poems for The New Testament, a meditation on race, masculinity and gay sexuality. Anisfield Wolf juror Rita Dove calls this book “a reminder that outrage is a seductive disease — we would rather rage or weep than find a way to love in spite of the pain. Brown’s poems brim with love for this damaged world without letting the world off the hook.” And poet Rae Armantrout adds her praise, noting: “Like the other new testament, it’s about what love can do.” Brown teaches creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta.
Hard Love Province is the fourth collection of poetry from Marilyn Chin, whose book mourns the loss of a beloved in a world that seems inured to suffering. “In these sad and beautiful poems, a withering portrayal of our global ‘society’ emerges – from Buddha to Allah, Mongols to Bethesda boys, Humvee to war horse, Dachau to West Darfu, Irrawaddy River to San Diego,” observes Dove. Among the 23 poems are One Child Has Brown Eyes and Black President. Adrienne Rich described Chin’s work as “powerful, uncompromised and unerring.” Born in Hong Kong, Chin is a professor at San Diego State University.
In scalding yet musical language , A Brief History of Seven Killings hinges on the true 1976 attempt to assassinate reggae legend Bob Marley. Novelist Marlon James just calls him The Singer, and sets this character among a pinwheel of voices: CIA agents, child gangsters, a Rolling Stone reporter, drug dealers, corrupt politicians and a woman seriously diverted by one night with the musician. Anisfield-Wolf juror Joyce Carol Oates praised the “superb risk-taking” of James, whose story brims with profanity, violence, dialect, tenderness and cruelty. James teaches at Macalester College in Minneapolis.
More than 40 years in the making, A Tale of Two Plantations is a scrupulous, revelatory archival investigation of some 2,000 people enslaved across three generations: roughly half on a Jamaican sugar plantation called Mesopotamia, and half on Mount Airy, a Virginia tidewater plantation growing tobacco and grain. Richard S. Dunn, a University of Pennsylvania historian, uses his findings to ask about enslaved motherhood, the effects of interracial sex on the meaning of family and how individuals fared upon emancipation. Oates calls the book magisterial, noting, “It is refreshing to encounter a historian who doesn't include a forced conclusion.”
David Brion Davis is a preeminent American historian whose 1967 book, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, earned an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. It anchors a groundbreaking trilogy that culminated last year in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, which in March won the National Book Critics Circle award. Harvard University President Drew Gilpin writes that Davis’ influence is deep, having changed “traditional approaches to intellectual history by embedding ideas in social and political action and institutions.” Born in Denver in 1927, Davis is an Army veteran who retired from Yale University in 2001. He lives in Connecticut.
The Anisfield-Wolf winners will be honored Sept. 10 at a ceremony at the Ohio Theatre in Cleveland, hosted by the Cleveland Foundation and emceed by Jury Chair Gates. For additional information, and a complete list of the recipients since 1935, visit www.Anisfield-Wolf.org.
