Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Awards 2024 finalists announced

The Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Awards 2024 finalists were announced in Washington, USA on Tuesday, August 27, 2024.

The Hurston/Wright Foundation is named for US African American literary icons Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award honours the best in Black literature in the United States and around the globe. The Legacy Award was the first national award in the USA presented to Black writers by a national organization of Black writers since 2001. Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry honourees are selected in a juried competition. Some of the previous winners include Alain Mabanckou, Colson Whitehead, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, Aminatta Forna, and Kwame Dawes. The winners in 2023 were Meron Hadero, T.L. Huchu, James Hannaham, Margaret Burnham, and Courtney Faye Taylor.

The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation announced its 2024 Merit Award honorees and the finalists for the Legacy on August 27.

“The annual Legacy Awards Ceremony is a singular and coveted recognition of excellence in writing by Black authors,” states Marita Golden, co-founder of The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation.

Here are the honorees and finalists;

The 2024 Merit Award winners are:

• The North Star Award: N.K. Jemisin
• The Ella Baker Award: Claudia Rankine
• The Madam C.J. Walker Award: Marcus Books

Debut Fiction

Judges: Natashia Deon, Sifiso Mzobe

• Family Lore, Elizabeth Acevedo (Ecco)
• The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts, Soraya Palmer (Catapult)
• In the Upper Country, Kai Thomas (Viking Books)

Speculative Fiction

Judge: T.L. Huchu, Rita Woods

• Spite House, Johnny Compton (Tor Nightfire)
• Mulberry Street Stories, Mary McLaughlin Slechta (Four Way Books)
• Lies of Ajungo, Moses Ose Utomi (Tordotcom)

General Fiction

Judges: JJ Amaworo, Alaya Johnson

• Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Pantheon Books)
• Time’s Undoing, Cheryl A. Head (Dutton)
• The Unsettled, Ayana Mathis (Alfred A Knopf)
• The History of a Difficult Child, Mihret Sibhat (Viking Books)

Historical Nonfiction

Judges: Quraysh Ali Lansana, Toni Ann Johnson

• Built From the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street, Victor Luckerson (Random House)
• When Crack Was King, Donovan X. Ramsey (One World)
• Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World, Yepoka Yeebo (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Memoir Nonfiction

Judge: Yvonne (E-vonne) Battle-Felton

• Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing, Dionne Ford (Bold Type Books)
• I Am Still With You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance, and History, Emmanuel Iduma (Algonquin Books)
• The Wreck: A Daughter’s Memoir of Becoming a Mother, Cassandra Jackson (Viking Books)
• The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Leta McCollough Seletzky (Counterpoint)
• Life on Other Planets, Aomawa Shields (Viking Books)

Poetry

Judges: Shara McCallum, Courtney Faye Taylor

• Things I Didn’t Do With This Body, Amanda Gunn (Copper Canyon Press)
• The Beloved Community, Patricia Spears Jones (Copper Canyon Press)
• When I Waked, I Cried To Dream Again, A. Van Jordan (W.W. Norton & Co.)
• Bread & Circus, Airea Dee Matthews (Scribner)
• Trace Evidence, Charif Shanahan (Tin House)

The winners of the Legacy Awards will be announced at the Washington Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C., USA on Friday, October 18, 2024.

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