The Lillian Smith Book Awards are sponsored by the Southern Regional Council, University of Georgia Libraries, DeKalb County Public Library/The Georgia Center for the Book, and Piedmont College, and are presented annually at the Decatur Book Festival. Charis is proud to be the bookseller for this event. Click here to register.
The Southern Regional Council established the Lillian Smith Award shortly after Smith's death in 1966. Internationally acclaimed author of the controversial novel, Strange Fruit (1944), Lillian Smith was the most liberal and outspoken of white, mid-twentieth century Southern writers on issues of social and racial injustice. When other Southern liberals were charting a cautious course on racial change, Smith boldly and persistently called for an end to segregation. For such boldness, she was often scorned by more moderate southerners, threatened by arsonists, and denied the critical attention she deserved as a writer. Yet she continued to write and speak for improved human relations and social justice throughout her life.
Selected by a panel of judges, nominated books represent outstanding creative achievements worthy of recognition because of their literary merit, moral vision, and honest representation of the South, its people, problems, and promises. The Lillian Smith Book Awards honors those authors who, through their writing, carry on Smith's legacy of elucidating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding that represents the ideals of a racially just society.
The 2020 winners will receive a specially-designed, glass trophy bearing the new, embossed Lillian Smith Book Award logo. The award was designed by Nate Nardi of Decatur Glassblowing, and the new logo was designed by Jerri Wilson of the DeKalb County Public Library.
The 2020 Lillian Smith Book Award winners are:
Jelani M. Favors, author of Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism, published by the University of North Carolina Press.
Brandon K. Winford, John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights, published by the University Press of Kentucky.
2020 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award
2020 Lillian Smith Book Award
Finalist, 2020 Pauli Murray Book Prize
WINNER OF THE LILLIAN SMITH BOOK AWARD