Literature Nominees for the 42st Annual NAACP Images Awards

LITERATURE CATEGORIES

Outstanding Literary Work -Fiction
• ‘A Taste of Honey’ – Jabari Asim (Broadway Books)
• ‘Getting to Happy’ – Terry McMillan (Penguin Group)
• ‘Glorious’ – Bernice L. McFadden (Akashic Books)
• ‘Till You Hear From Me’ – Pearl Cleage (Ballantine Books/One World)
• ‘Wench’ – Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Amistad)

Outstanding Literary Work -Non-Fiction
• ‘Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority’ – Tom Burrell (SmileyBooks)
• ‘Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts of Women in SNCC’ – Editors: Faith
S. Holsaert, Judy Richardson, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Betty Garman
Robinson, Jean Smith Young, Dorothy M. Zellner (University of Illinois Press)
• ‘Surviving and Thriving 365 Days in Black Economic History’ – Dr. Julianne Malveaux
(Last Word Productions, Inc.)
• ‘The History of White People’ – Nell Irvin Painter (W.W. Norton & Company)
• ‘The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness’ – Michelle
Alexander (The New Press)

Outstanding Literary Work -Debut Author
• ‘Wench’ – Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Amistad)
• ‘The Girl Who Fell from the Sky’ – Heidi Durrow (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
• ‘The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration’ – Isabel
Wilkerson (Random House)
• ‘Beneath the Lion’s Gaze’ – Maaza Mengiste (W.W. Norton & Company)
• ‘Forest Gate’ – Peter Akinti (Free Press/Simon & Schuster)

Outstanding Literary Work -Biography/Auto-Biography
• ‘Conversations with Myself’ – Ruth Hobday, Nelson Mandela (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• ‘Decoded’ – Jay-Z (Spiegel & Gran, a division of Random House)
• ‘Extraordinary, Ordinary People’ – Condoleezza Rice (Crown Archetype)
• ‘I’m Still Standing: From Captive U.S. Soldier to Free Citizen – My Journey Home’ -
Shoshana Johnson (Touchstone, An Imprint of Simon & Schuster)
• ‘You Don’t Know Me: Reflections of My Father, Ray Charles’ – Ray Charles Robinson,
Jr. (Crown)

Outstanding Literary Work -Instructional
• ‘A Boy Should Know How to Tie a Tie: And Other Lessons for Succeeding in Life’ -
Antwone Fisher (Touchstone, An Imprint of Simon & Schuster)
• ‘Diet-Free for Life: A Revolutionary Food, Fitness and Mindset Makeover to Maximize Fat Loss’ – Robert Ferguson (Penguin Group USA, Perigee Hardcover)
• ‘If it Takes a Village, Build One: How I Found Meaning Through a Life of Service and 100+ Ways You Can Too’ – Malaak Compton-Rock (Crown Archetype)
• ‘The Blueprint: A Plan for Living Above Life’s Storms’ – Kirk Franklin (Gotham Books)
• ‘The Little Black Book of Success: Laws of Leadership for Black Women’ – Elaine Meryl Brown, Rhonda McLean, Marsha Haygood (Ballantine Books/One World)

Outstanding Literary Work -Poetry
• ’100 Best African-American Poems’ – Nikki Giovanni (Sourcebooks MediaFusion)
• ‘Hard Times Require Furious Dancing’ – Alice Walker (Author), Shiloh McCloud (Illustrator) (New World Library)
• ‘Holding Company’ – Major Jackson (W.W. Norton & Company)
• ‘Suck on the Marrow’ – Camille T. Dungy (Red Hen Press)
• ‘White Egrets’ – Derek Walcott (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Outstanding Literary Work -Children
• ‘Grandma’s Gift’ – Eric Velasquez (Bloomsbury USA Children’s Books)
• ‘Mama Miti: Wangai Maathai and the Tree of Kenya’ – Donna Jo Napoli (Author), Kadir Nelson (Illustrator) (Paula Wiseman Books, Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing)
• ‘My Brother Charlie’ – Holly Robinson Peete, Ryan Elizabeth Peete (Scholastic Press)
• ‘Side by Side/Lado a Lado: The Story of Delores Huerta and Cesar Chavez’ – Monica Brown (Author), Joe Cepeda (Illustrator) (Harper Collins Children’s Books)
• ‘The Great Migration: Journey to the North’ – Eloise Greenfield (Author), Jan Pivey Gilchrist (Illustrator) (Harper Collins Children’s Books)

Outstanding Literary Work -Youth/Teens
• ‘Condoleezza Rice A Memoir of My Extraordinary, Ordinary Family and Me’ – Condoleezza Rice (Random House Children’s Books)
• ‘Lockdown’ – Walter Dean Myers (Harper Collins Children’s Books)
• ‘Malcolm X: I Believe in the Brotherhood of Man, All Men’ – Jeff Burlingame (Enslow Publishers, Inc.)
• ‘Out of My Mind’ – Sharon Draper (Atheneum Young Reader)
• ‘One Crazy Summer’ – Rita Williams-Garcia (Harper Collins Children’s Books)

Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems by Alice Walker

Sensual Sounds

Take time out to slow down and appreciate love in various forms. From love of self to love of that special someone. “Sensual Sounds” will help you apppreciate the world around you. Available on amazon and barnesandnoble.com. Published by IUniverse.

Sensual Sounds: A Collection
by Marcie Eanes

Iuniverse
Available 01/20/10 in Paperback

Sensual Sounds is a thought-provoking poetry collection designed to inspire and encourage readers to cherish intimate relationships. Nationally featured writer, poet and motivational speaker Marcie Eanes draws for everyday experiences to create compelling poetic verse.

Sensual Sounds is separated into five sections. Each reflects Eanes’s skill and talent in encouraging readers to rediscover personal passions and mend strained relationships along with celebrating everyone’s bliss. Sensual Sounds contains something for everyone. Eanes’s upbeat poetry, which has been presented in a variety of settings, resonates with audiences everywhere. Among poetry’s varied landscape, Eanes’s unique voice is much needed nourishment for the soul. Sensual Sounds is a priceless addition to all avid poetry lovers’ collections.

Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez

Beacon Press
Available 02/01/10 in Hardcover

This new volume by the much-loved poet Sonia Sanchez, her first in over a decade, is music to the ears: a collection of haiku that celebrates the gifts of life and mourns the deaths of revered African American figures in the worlds of music, literature, art, and activism.

In her verses, we hear the sounds of Max Roach “exploding in the universe,” the “blue hallelujahs” of the Philadelphia Murals, and the voice of Odetta “thundering out of the earth.” Sanchez sings the praises of contemporaries whose poetic alchemy turns “words into gems”: Maya Angelou, Richard Long, and Toni Morrison. And she pays homage to peace workers and civil rights activists from Rosa Parks and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm to Brother Damu, founder of the National Black Environmental Justice Network. Often arranged in strings of twelve or more, the haiku flow one into the other in a steady song of commemoration. Sometimes deceptively simple, her lyrics hold a very powerful load of emotion and meaning. There are intimate verses here for family and friends, verses of profound loss and silence, of courage and resilience. Sanchez is innovative, composing haiku in new forms, including a section of moving two-line poems that reflect on the long wake of 9/11.

In a brief and personal opening essay, the poet explains her deep appreciation for haiku as an art form. With its touching portraits and by turns uplifting and heartbreaking lyrics, Morning Haiku contains some of Sanchez’s freshest, most poignant work.

The Great Invitation by Aaron Jones

Available 12/05/08

The Great Invitation is a collection of poetry that will inspire your soul. Each poetic selection is filled and inspired by the Holy Scriptures. God has sent out the greatest invitation of them all through his son Jesus Christ. The question is will you accept this invitation to heaven. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”-John 3:16 Salvation is waiting, and God has shown us patience, accept his invitation.