BCALA Announces the 2014 Literary Awards Winners

Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc.
BCALA Literary Awards Committee

Press Release                                                                                        Contact: Gladys Smiley Bell 757-727-5185
For Immediate Release or gladys.bell@hamptonu.edu
January 25, 2014                                                                                 
Press Room-Philadelphia Convention Center

 The Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Inc. (BCALA) announces the winners of the 2014 BCALA Literary Awards during the Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association in Philadelphia, PA. The awards recognize excellence in adult fiction and nonfiction by African American authors published in 2013, including an award for Best Poetry and a citation for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing. The recipients will receive the awards during the 2014 Annual Conference of the American Library Association in Las Vegas, NV.
The winner of the 1st Novelist Award is The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat: A Novel by Edward Kelsey Moore (Alfred A. Knopf).

The Fiction category winner is The Good Lord Bird: A Novel by James McBride (Riverhead). The Honor Book for Fiction is The Residue Years: A Novel by Mitchell S. Jackson (Bloomsbury).

The winner in the Nonfiction category is Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities by Craig Steven Wilder (Bloomsbury).

Honor Books for Nonfiction are Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery by Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer  (Temple University Press); Kansas City Lightning: The Life and Times of Young Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch (Harper); and Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time by Adrian Miller (The University of North Carolina Press).

The BCALA Literary Awards Committee presents the Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation to Soul Train: The Music, Dance, and Style of a Generation by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (Harper Design).

The winner for BCALA’s Best Poetry Award is Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid by Nikki Giovanni (William Morrow). The Honor Book for Poetry is Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers Frank X. Walker (University of Georgia Press).

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; Carolyn Garnes, Atlanta, GA; DL Grant, San Antonio Public Library; John Page, Washington, D.C.; and Apryl Price, Florida State University.