The Hurston/Wright Foundation recently released a list of nominees for the Legacy Awards, annual prizes given to writers of African descent for books of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and a first book of fiction published in the previous year.
The nominees in poetry are Jericho Brown for Please, Myronn Hardy for The Headless Saints, and Yusef Komunyakaa for Warhorses. The nominees in fiction are Uwem Akpan for Say You're One of Them, Jeffery Renard Allen for Holding Pattern: Stories, Breena Clarke for Stand the Storm, Rananarive Due for Blood Colony, James McBride for Song Yet Sung, and Jesmyn Ward for Where the Line Bleeds. Akpan and Ward's books are both debuts.
The nominees in nonfiction are Sheryll Cashin for The Agitator's Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African-American Family, Ta-Nehisi Coates for The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina for Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and into Legend, Paula J. Giddings for Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, Marcus Reeves for Somebody Scream!: Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power, and Frank B. Wilderson III for Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid.
The winners in each category, to be announced in November, will receive three thousand dollars. The finalists will each receive fifteen hundred dollars.
Last year's winners were Kyle Dargan for his poetry collection Bouquet of Hungers, Junot Díaz for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Kwame Dawes for his debut book of fiction She's Gone, and Edwidge Danticat for her memoir Brother, I'm Dying.
Below is a video of Kayle Dargan reading a poem from Bouquet of Hungers.