“Literature as a Vehicle.” A Unique Book Prize Focuses on Works Addressing Racism and Diversity
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From Left to right: Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Matthew F. Delmont, Geraldine Brooks, Lan Samantha Chang, Saeed Jones and Karen Long at the podium. Photo by McKinley Wiley.
Since 1963, the Cleveland Foundation has sponsored the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (AWBAs), the only juried American book prize focusing on works that address racism and diversity. I recently had the opportunity to chat with the award’s manager, Karen R. Long, who recounted an especially poignant moment from the September 28 awards ceremony.
A little over halfway through the evening, Matthew Delmont accepted his award in the nonfiction category for his book “Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad,” and began his speech by recognizing one of the ceremony’s attendees, Robert P. Madison, a 100-year-old Black veteran and Cleveland native. Long after the war was over, Delmont explained, Madison went to a bookstore, and after scanning the hundreds of titles in stock, didn’t see a single book about the more than 1 million Black Americans who served. “I wrote ‘Half-American’ for men and women like Robert Madison,” Delmont said.
In our video call two months later, Long was still visibly moved recalling the moment. “Instead of going to his seat, the good professor went to Mr. Madison and embraced him,” she said. “You can’t even begin to capture what it means to have the work personified and partially rectified.”
Long’s perspective exemplifies how the AWBAs, which also include prizes for nonfiction, poetry and a Lifetime Achievement award, aim to further the discussion on race at a time when philanthropy is striving to amplify historically underrepresented voices and cultivate a more inclusive society. The foundation’s support is particularly important because it flows to a literary arts field that receives relatively tepid support from funders.
The prize’s mission is all the more compelling given the fact that its namesake, Edith Anisfield Wolf, established it in 1935, anticipating funders’ interest in leveraging the arts as a means to galvanize social change by close to nine decades. “It’s happened just once,” Long said, “that someone decided to put their fortune and their energies into using literature as a vehicle to help us do better in the civic space.”
“Who haven’t you invited to the table?”
Edith’s father, John Anisfield, emigrated to the United States from Austria in 1876, settled in Cleveland and eventually built his fortune in the garment industry. With assistance from Edith, John became a prominent philanthropist in the greater Cleveland area. One of the pair’s largest recipients was Mount Sinai Hospital, which, as unfathomable as it sounds now, was the first institution in Cleveland to accept patients regardless of creed or color.
John passed away in 1929. Five years later, Edith, who was a poet and civic activist, launched the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards — named in part for her then-husband, Eugene Wolf — with the mission of celebrating the best writing addressing racism at a time when segregation was still the law of the land. The Saturday Review, an American weekly magazine established in 1924, sponsored the awards until 1963, when the Cleveland Foundation assumed that role. More than 250 titles have joined the AWBA canon since Anisfield Wolf established the prize.
Long spent 30 years at the Plain Dealer, where, among other roles, she was a reporter and book editor. She came to the foundation as a consultant for the AWBA in 2013 and joined the staff three years later. Early in her tenure, a consultant proposed the foundation change the award’s name to The Cleveland Prize. “I was brand new at the time, but I put my foot down and said no way,” she said. “I’m very proud we still use that name.”
The foundation announced the 2023 prize winners in April. In addition to Delmont, they included Lan Samantha Chang for “The Family Chao” (fiction), Saeed Jones for “Alive at the End of the World” (poetry), and civil rights activist and journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault (lifetime achievement award). Each individual received $10,000.
Having been involved with the AWBAs for a decade, Long remains in awe of Edith’s astonishingly forward-looking and adaptive vision. “She created this beautiful instrument. She was thinking Black, white, Jewish, but through the decades, the prize has fit its era. There was an ability to respond to the LGBTQ movement, and then to the tensions between Muslims and Christians after 9/11. It became more capacious and a way of asking, ‘Who haven’t you invited to the table?’”
Deferring to jurors’ “sophistication of discernment”
The AWBA jury was chaired by scholar and lecturer Henry Louis Gates Jr. from 1996 to September 2023. On October 1, he was succeeded by two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. The jury currently consists of Trethewey, fellow Poet Laureate Rita Dove, novelist Peter Ho Davies, public historian and writer Tiya Miles, and psychologist Steven Pinker.
The foundation receives 300 to 400 submissions a year from publishing houses and authors. Long provides jurors with a list of every book that comes in along with a short description, a copy of the book and a one-page contact sheet for each title. Long also compiles what she called “40 or 50 books in the cultural conversation” throughout the year and sends these books to jury members, who provide her with ongoing commentary and interesting books they’ve come across. Jurors also speak with one another throughout the vetting process.
The foundation does not provide jurors with stringent selection criteria. Instead, leaders default to what Long called their “sophistication of discernment,” citing Steven Pinker’s penchant for disqualifying books with sloppy footnotes. “As daunting as it sounds, the jury is looking for a book that will be read in 100 years, and that’s almost no book, so you apply the Malcolm Gladwell ‘Blink’ idea — and that strong B+ isn’t going to be it,” Long said. “They’re also looking for something beautiful to read because they’re producers of beautiful things to read.”
The ABWAs are one of three initiatives within the Cleveland Foundation’s Arts and Culture program. Launched in 2008, the foundation’s Creative Fusion international arts residency program has brought more than 90 artists to Cleveland. The third program, Arts Mastery Education, ensures that every child in Cleveland has access to high-quality arts programs by partnering with local organizations like the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Classical Guitar Society.
Promoting the AWBA canon
Another important component of the awards is how the foundation works to infuse the AWBA canon across the literary ecosystem. For example, the prize’s site includes educational resources to support lesson planning for prize-winning books for grades K-12 and postsecondary classrooms. Long noted that one local nonprofit, Lake Erie Ink, used a foundation grant to create classroom videos for teachers using AWBA authors during the pandemic.
The foundation also funds fellowships to foster students’ understanding of racism and their appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures by studying the AWBA canon. “Edith Anisfield Wolf created the book awards to recognize literature dedicated to fostering conversations about tolerance and cultural acceptance,” said Anisfield-Wolf SAGES fellow Lisa Nielson, a historical musicologist at Case Western Reserve University. “Through these books and my students, I am constantly working to hear what I think was her real message: Listen.”
These efforts speak to what Long considers the most rewarding aspect of the job — “to see people who understand the work so deeply, generate pedagogy, put their learnings up on the curriculum website and put unexpected combinations of books together and bring them to young people who are in the process of identity formation.”
Long told me the foundation plans to announce the 2024 ABWA winners toward the end of March or the beginning of April. In the meantime, it will be a race to the finish for the prize’s jurors, and if the past is any indication, some difficult decisions lie ahead. “In recent years, there have been two fiction or two nonfiction winners because I can’t force the jurors to choose,” Long said with a chuckle. “I’m hoping my successor does a better job.”
