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 The 2007 Wheatley
Book Awards
The Wheatley Book Award was established to recognize literary achievement that transcends culture, boundary, and perception. Join us on Friday, July 20th at 7:00 pm at the Schomburg Center, 515 Malcolm X Boulevard at West 135th Street as we honor this year's recipients. Our pre-award program will be a Tribute to Octavia Butler and Ossie Davis. Join us for a very special evening. Suggested donation: $10. Reserve your seat early rsvp@qbr.com
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Our 2007 Honorees:
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Eloise Greenfield
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Eloise Greenfield's illustrious list of books for young people includes Me and Neesie; In the Land of Words, an NCTE 2005 Notable Children's Book in the Language Arts; Honey, I Love; and How They Got Over: African Americans and the Call of the Sea, all illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist. She is the recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award; the Award of Excellence from the D.C. Area Writing Project, the local arm of the National Writing Project, whose mission is to instruct educators in how to teach writing; the Milner Award; the Hope S. Dean Award from the Foundation for Children's Literature; and the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children. Ms. Greenfield lives in Washington, DC.
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Walter Mosley
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Walter Mosley is the winner of numerous awards, including the Anisfield Wolf Award, an honor given to works that increase the appreciation and understanding of race in America. He was a finalist for the NAACP Award in Fiction and won the 1996 Black Caucus of the American Library Association's Literary Award for RL's Dream. He was an O. Henry Award winner in 1996 (for a Socrates Fortlow story). In 2005 the Sundance Institute gave him a "Risktaker Award" for both his creative and activist efforts. In 2006 he was the first recipient of the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award for his young adult novel 47.
Mosley holds an honorary doctorate from the City College of New York, is on the Board of Trustees for Goddard College, and has served on the board of directors of the National Book Awards.
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Amiri Baraka
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Amiri Baraka's first published work was a play, A GOOD GIRL IS HARD TO FIND (1958). In 1961 appeared PREFACE TO A TWENTY VOLUME SUICIDE NOTE, a book of verse with personal and domestic poems. The book was published in an underground series that included work by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Several other collections followed, among them THE DEAD LECTURER (1964), BLACK ART (1966) and BLACK MAGIC (1969). His later collections include IT'S NATION TIME (1970) SPIRIT REACH (1972), HARD FACTS (1977), AM/TRAK (1979), and THOUGHTS FOR YOU! (1984).
In 1964 Baraka had four of his plays produced: THE BAPTISM, THE TOILET, THE SLAVE and THE DUTCHMAN, which received the Off Broadway award for the best American play of 1963-64. "The Dutchman was also, in part, responsible for the growth of a genre of black literature known as the Black Arts movement. Younger black writers, including Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Ed Bullins, Sonia Sanchez, Marvin X, and Larry Neal, soon produced a torrent of black-themed works that sought to establish the artistic validity of African-American cultural idioms and that was often openly antiwhite. ... With The Dutchman Baraka opened the doors for black American writers to deal with a broad range of political, racial, and social themes."
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