2010 BCALA Literary Award Winners

The Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) announced the winners of the 2010 BCALA Literary Awards during the Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association in Boston, MA. The awards recognize excellence in adult fiction and nonfiction by African American authors published in 2009, including the work of a first novelist, and a citation for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing. The recipients will receive the awards during the 2010 Annual Conference of the American Library Association in Washington, D.C.

The winner in the Fiction category is Buying Time by Pamela Samuels Young (Goldman House).

The two Fiction Honor Book winners are Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday) and Carried by Six by Allen Ballard (Seaford Press).

Buying Time is a captivating, suspenseful thriller focused on greed, murder and corruption in the viatical industry. Waverly Sloan, a disbarred attorney about to lose it all, ventures into a very lucrative career redeeming life insurance policies for the terminally ill. He soon discovers however that the life-threatening dangers of this new career outweigh the financial gains. The well developed subplots of domestic violence and pedophilia heightens the suspense of the novel and also generates constant juggling of the suspects list. Samuels-Young, a corporate attorney in Southern California, is the author of three previous mysteries.

Sag Harbor is a humorous coming of age tale where Colson Whitehead provides readers with an inside view of what it means to be black and affluent, but mainly what it means to be a teenage boy. Whitehead clearly captures 1980s popular culture as well as tapping into the African American vernacular and oral traditions. Colson Whitehead is an award winning author and lives in Brooklyn.

Carried by Six is a gripping page-turner, where Obie Bullock, leader of the Men of Africa United (MauMau) has waged a war against the drug dealers who have taken over his urban Philadelphia neighborhood. Tired of being terrorized by the dealers and having the young men of the neighborhood either being “carried by six” pallbearers to their graves or “judged by twelve” and sentenced to a prison term, Obie fights to keep his family safe and himself alive while making his neighborhood a better place to live. Author Allen Ballard, a Philadelphia native, now lives in Albany, NY where he teaches history and Africana Studies at the State University of Albany.

The winner in the Nonfiction category is The Breakthrough by Gwen Ifill (Doubleday).

An Honor Book winner for Nonfiction was also selected: Freedom Struggles by Adriane Lentz-Smith (Harvard University Press).

The Breakthrough explores the political leadership of the Black community starting with the Civil Rights Movement and progressing to the contemporary and what Ifill calls “The Age of Obama.” Not until the appearance of President Barack Obama on the national political scene did political leadership become so hotly contested within the Black community. Ifill describes this power struggle between two generations of Black leadership as “sandpaper politics” where change is often abrasive but necessary. The Breakthrough provides intriguing and insightful profiles of Black leaders engaged in national politics as well as rising stars at the local and state levels. Gwen Ifill is moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and senior correspondent of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Through the experiences of the 200,000 black soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, Freedom Struggles uses moving stories and experiences to bring forth a significantly influential but little known aspect of American history. Adriane Lentz-Smith is Assistant Professor of History at Duke University.

The recipient of the First Novelist Award is K.C. Marshall for My Sister’s Veil (XLibris). This debut novel is an inspirational and motivating story about the trials and tribulations of three strong Black women. Their lives are separated yet connected through their friendship and consequential environment. Using their inner strength or spiritual “veil”, the main characters show how their ancestral culture shapes their drive to overcome adversities thus giving them the fortitude to make a difference changing themselves and their circumstances. K.C. Marshall is a free lance writer.

For excellence in scholarship, the BCALA Literary Awards Committee presents the Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation to In Search of Our Roots by Henry Louis Gates (Crown Publishers). Gates has taken his popular PBS television documentary and captured his extensive genealogical research in a compelling book. Nineteen famous and unknown African Americans allow us to follow their incredible journey tracing family sagas through slavery and back to Africa. This is a book of enormous importance that will inspire others to take this courageous journey to explore their family roots.

Members of the BCALA Literary Awards Jury are: Joel W. White, Chair, Durham (NC) County Library; Virginia Dowsing Toliver, Vice Chair, Washington University in St. Louis; Gladys Smiley Bell, Hampton University; Karen B. Douglas, Duke University Law Library; Makiba Foster, Washington University in St. Louis; Carolyn Garnes, Library Consultant, Atlanta, GA; and Ernestine Hawkins, East Cleveland Public Library.