BCALA Announces the 2015 Literary Awards Winners

Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc.

BCALA Literary Awards Committee

February 1, 2015 | For Immediate Release: Press Release

Press Room – McCormick Place, Chicago, IL

Contact: Gladys Smiley Bell 757-727-5185 or [email protected]

BCALA Announces the 2015 Literary Awards Winners

The Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc. (BCALA) announces the winners of the 2015 BCALA Literary Awards during the Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association in Chicago, IL. The awards recognize excellence in adult fiction and nonfiction by African American authors published in 2014, including an award for Best Poetry and a citation for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing. The recipients will receive the awards during the 2015 Annual Conference of the American Library Association in San Francisco, CA.

The winner of the 1st Novelist Award is Forty Acres: A Thriller by Dwayne Alexander Smith (Atria Books).

The Fiction category winneris Citizens Creek: A Novel by Lalita Tademy (Atria Books).

The Honor Books for Fiction are Saint Monkey: A Novelby Jacinda Townsend (W. W. Norton & Company); ‘Til the Well Runs Dry: A Novel by Lauren Francis-Sharma (Henry Holt & Company); and Ruby by Cynthia Bond (Crown Publishing Group).

The winner in the Nonfiction category is Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas by Jeffrey B. Leak (University of Georgia Press).

Honor Books for Nonfiction are Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina by Misty Copeland (Touchstone); Dorothy Porter Wesley at Howard University: Building a Legacy of Black History by Janet Sims-Wood (The History Press); and The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology, edited by Anthony B. Pinn and Katie G. Cannon (Oxford University Press).

The winner for BCALA’s Best Poetry Award is Books of Hours: Poems by Kevin Young (Knopf).

The BCALA Literary Awards Committee presents the Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation to Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian by Ethelene Whitmire (University of Illinois Press). The Jury has also selected Virginia Stanley, Director of Library Marketing, HarperCollins Publisher, for a Special Publishing Citation Award.

Members of the BCALA Literary Awards Jury are: Gladys Smiley Bell (Chair), Hampton University; Jennifer Baxmeyer, Princeton University; Tracy Crawford, Queens Library’s Langston Hughes Community Library and Cultural Center; Tiffany Duck, Jefferson-Madison Regional Library; Carolyn Garnes, Atlanta, GA; John Page, Washington, D.C.; and Apryl Price, Florida State University.