Columbus Foundation has announced the Winners of the Thirty-Third Annual AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS. East St. Louis (IL) Poet Laureate Eugene B. Redmond will be accepting his second ABA – this time for Lifetime Achievement – after garnering his first one (for ‘literary excellence’) in 1993 for The Eye in the Ceiling: Selected Poems.
The American Book Awards, created to recognize outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community, highlight literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. The awardees range from well-known and established writers to under-recognized authors and first works. The Awards are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are writers? awards given by other writers.
Accompanied by fellow EBR Writers Club members Charlois Lumpkin and Darlene
Roy, Redmond, an emeritus professor of English and founding editor of
Drumvoices Revue at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, will “perform” his acceptance of the award at UC Berkeley.
The ESL native has written and edited several dozen books, journals, magazines and plays for stage and TV.
As literary executor of the Henry Dumas Estate, and with the assistance of Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka and Toni Morrison, Redmond edited more than six books by Dumas (1934-1968), a colleague of his at SIUE’s ESL Experiment in Higher Education in the 1960’s.
The 2012 American Book Award Winners are:
ANNIA CIEZADLO, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War (Free Press)
ARLENE KIM, What Have You Done to Our Ears to Make Us Hear Echoes? (Milkweed
Editions)
ED BOK LEE, Whorled (Coffee House Press)
ADILIFU NAMA, Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes
(University of Texas Press)
ROB NIXON, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard
University Press)
SHANN RAY, American Masculine (Graywolf Press)
ALICE REARDEN, translator, Ann Fienup-Riordan, editor, Qaluyaarmiuni Nunamtenek
Qanemciput: Our Nelson Island Stories (University of Washington Press)
TOURE, Who?s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now (Free
Press)
AMY WALDMAN, The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
MARY WINEGARDEN, The Translator?s Sister (Mayapple Press)
KEVEN YOUNG, Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf)
EUGENE B. REDMOND: Lifetime Achievement Award
The 2012 American Book Award winners will be formally recognized on Sunday, October 7th from 2:00-5:00 p.m. in the Maud Fife Room located in Wheeler Hall on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. The October 7
awards event is open to the public.
