The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation has announced the finalists for its Zora Awards, which honor “Black writers in the United States and around the globe for literary achievement.”
Shortlisted in the fiction category are National Book Award winner Jason Mott for People Like Us, Harmonia Rosales for Chronicles of Ori, and Lauren Francis Sharma for Casualties of Truth. The finalists for the debut fiction prize are Justin Haynes for Ibis, Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo for The Tiny Things Are Heavier, and Princess Joy L. Perry for This Here Is Love.
Making the nonfiction shortlist are MS NOW journalist Jonathan Capehart for Yet Here I Am: Lessons From a Black Man’s Search For Home; Danielle Bainbridge for Dandelion: A Memoir in Essays; and Lindsey Stewart for The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women’s Magic.
Competing for the poetry award are Douglas Kearney for I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always, Shane McCrae for New and Collected Hell: A Poem, and Golden for Reprise: Poems and Photographs.
The Zora Awards, formerly the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, were established in 2001. Previous winners include Tayari Jones for Leaving Atlanta, Danielle Evans for Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, and Isabel Wilkerson for The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.
The winners of this year’s awards will be announced at an event in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 9.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
