For the last event of the inaugural Cleveland Book Week, Brian Seibert rolled up his cuffs and gave the audience at the Beck Center for the Arts what they had been waiting for: a live tap dance performance. Seibert, a New York Times dance critic and himself a studied dancer, chronicles the roots of this uniquely American art form in What the Eye Hears, winner of our 2016 award for nonfiction.
His remarks were peppered with video and audio from tap dancing’s origins, including some of the earliest recorded footage from the 19th century. To cap off his reading, Oberlin student Chandler Browne accompanied Seibert for a few minutes of breathtaking hoofing, inviting the audience to soak in both improvised rhythms and their rendition of the “Shim Sham Shimmy,” a tap dance classic. Take a look below:
Orlando Patterson, the public intellectual and Harvard University sociologist, made a deep impression on his audiences in Cleveland in September. He received a rousing standing ovation, capping the awards ceremony in the Ohio Theatre of Playhouse Square. A few listeners walked out – which is also in keeping with the tenor of the reception to his globally influential scholarship.
“At Harvard, neither personal comfort nor false harmony have ever been his goal; he has always challenged his fellow faculty with his outspoken and fearless ideas,” said Anisfield-Wolf Jurist Steven Pinker as he introduced Patterson. “As colleagues, we have all found him forthright and reliably engaged; however, his gracious manner, and the musical Jamaican lilt of his penetrating discourse, often mask the uncomfortable truth that we have just been served.”
Patterson, 76, commanded his Cleveland audiences in just such manner, both during his acceptance and his lecture the preceding afternoon at the Baker-Nord Center for Humanities’ Harkness Chapel. Both set of remarks, in turn, rest on “The Cultural Matrix,” a set of essays Patterson edited with his doctoral student, Ethan Posse. He also applied them to an essay after the response in Baltimore to Freddie Gray’s death in police custody in the New York Times.
At the awards ceremony, Patterson told Clevelanders, “Few other groups, with the possible exception of Jews in Europe, have contributed more to the culture of the group that dominated and excluded them than black Americans – in music, dance, theatre, literature, sports and more generally in the style and vibrancy of its dominant culture, America is indelibly blackish. Trying to imagine America without blacks is like trying to imagine Lake Erie without oxygen.”
Here are Orlando Patterson’s full remarks at the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. If you’d like to watch his acceptance speech, click here:
Thank you very much for that generous introduction, Steve. I am deeply honored by this award, made all the more gratifying by the fact that one of my dearest and most esteemed friends and colleagues is the person chosen to introduce me, based on remarks prepared by another greatly admired colleague and friend, Henry Louis Gates.
Cleveland Foundation President Ronald Richard, organizers and jury members of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Ladies and Gentlemen, in the few minutes that I have your attention, I want to reflect aloud with you on two great paradoxes of “race” in American civilization.
The first is the fact that, going back to the earliest years of the Republic, we find that Black Americans, while being exploited as slaves and workers, and while being shunned socially into rural and urban ghettos, have nonetheless been embraced culturally. Few other groups, with the possible exception of the Jews of Europe, have contributed more to the culture of the group that dominated and excluded them, than black Americans—in music, dance, theatre, literature, sports and more generally in the style and vibrancy of its dominant culture, America is indelibly blackish. Trying to imagine America without blacks, is like trying to imagine Lake Erie without oxygen.
The second paradox of race in America came with our glorious civil rights revolution. And it was a revolution, let us not forget it, as we seem prone to do today in expressing our outrage at the brutality of our penal and security system. In righting the racial wrongs of its past America did what no other white majority society in the world has been able to do—it opened its public and civic space to its once shunned black minority. Today black Americans are major players in the nation’s political and civic life, the election of President Obama being the capstone– a monumental one to be sure–but the culmination, nonetheless, of this great struggle by our civil rights fathers to achieve what Martin Luther King called the beloved community. Let us give praise where praise is due: our great nation is the supreme model for the rest of the world of how the polity of a great nation, the most powerful on earth, can integrate into the innermost corridors of power, the leaders of its once shunned minority.
Cultural integration and influence out of all proportion to their size, on the one hand, and political and civic incorporation, on the other, are the two great achievements or American civilization with respect to its African-American minority.
And yet, and yet, at the same time that we have witnessed this magnificent political and cultural process, this nation continues to witness the incredible social isolation and economic disadvantage of the black minority as well as the unprecedented and outrageous incarceration of black youth, most for crimes that all other civilized nations would treat as minor offences deserving rehabilitation rather than incarceration. It is truly amazing that, for all this progress black Americans remain today almost as socially segregated as they were in the late sixties; that for all this cultural and political progress, combined with striking changes in the racial attitudes of white Americans, black Americans are still twice as unemployed as white Americans, that they continue to earn 65% of the median income of white Americans, exactly the same proportion that they earned in 1970, that the typical white household has 16 times the wealth of a black one, that one in 3 black youth are certain to spend part of their lives in prison, that the police of this nation still enter and treat black neighborhoods as if they are an occupying army and still feel empowered to cut down our black youth with impunity.
Nowhere in America are these two great paradoxes more evident than in this great city of Cleveland and the state of which it is a part. Last night I witnessed the extraordinary cultural presence of black America in our cultural life as I sat with the largest and most integrated audience I have ever seen, listening in rapt attention and near reverence to Rita Dove reading her gloriously American poems. And it is Cleveland and the state of Ohio, black and white, that twice voted for, and made possible the election of a black man to the nation’s and the world’s most powerful position.
And there was that amazing civic occasion several months ago when over a million persons turned out on the streets of your city to celebrate and worship the youthful, magically talented athletic gods that had brought glory and an unprecedented sense of civic pride to your city.
And yet, and yet, how many of those who came to cherish and give thanks to the young black heroes, on waking up next morning and seeing someone who looked like LeBron James moving in next door could resist the impulse to make a panic call to their real estate agent?
So this, ladies and gentlemen, in a nutshell is the great challenge that awaits us: to solve these two intertwined paradoxes of our national life. It can be done. Let us not be crippled by the miasma of pessimism that now stifles us. Let us not generalize our anger and outrage at the behavior of the nation’s police forces to chronic pessimism about the state and future of race relations in America. For if there is one thing that will ensure that the remaining work to be done in erasing racial bias and inequality in America will never be achieved, it is pessimism about it ever happening. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling malady.
What is needed is that same sense of racial justice and optimism about the future that animated the philanthropy of Edith Anisfield- Wolf. That same conviction about the possibility of America to change that inspired W.E.B DuBois and the other great political and cultural heroes of the Jim Crow era, and that motivated Martin Luther King to struggle and give his life for an America that fulfilled the rights enshrined in its Declaration and Constitution. With that conviction, with that optimism about the capacity of this great nation to change, this last most urgent challenge of social and economic integration can be met. In spite of all the obstacles and pessimism so much on display today, it will be done. Of that I am completely confident.
by Lisa Nielson,Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University.
I was taking an internet break from my pile of books in the National Library of Jerusalem this summer when a news article caught my eye. It reported the Jerusalem Pride Parade was going to kick off in about four hours — at 6 p.m. July 21, 2016 — in a park not far from where I was living. A year earlier, an ultra-orthodox fanatic stabbed six people at the march. One of the victims, Shira Banki, was 16 when she died. This time, the police were taking no chances. They blocked streets so participants could only join from certain points; they kept counter-protesters off the parade route and they prevented the family of the young girl’s killer from coming to Jerusalem.
I walked home, put on my purple “LGBT? Fine with Me!” shirt and joined the thin stream of people picking a way through the twisting back alleys and side streets of modern Jerusalem to reach the start. A crowd milled, waiting to go through security. Later I learned the organizers ran out of wrist bands. As I stepped into the park I found hundreds of people – shouting over pounding pop music, greeting friends, hoisting signs, draping flags. Some wore drag; some wore wings, some wore not much, but everyone seemed busy taking pictures with their phones. There were families with babies, soldiers in uniform, and visitors from outside Israel like myself.
My mother came out as a lesbian when I was 13. She did so at one of the toughest and most confusing times of her life, in conservative Salt Lake City. I remember being incredibly proud of her, yet too young to understand the importance of her decision. So my mom liked to sleep with women? Big deal.
Nevertheless, I found out we were not safe. Authorities might take me away from her; she could lose her job. Even worse, she could also be forcibly hospitalized. We knew a lesbian, I’ll call her Susan, who called a confidential hotline one night in desperation. The hotline worker called the police. We took care of her daughter while hospital staff gave her intensive drug and electro-shock therapy. Not long after her discharge, Susan killed herself – I never learned what happened to her child.
As the Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow at Case, I read each new crop of winning books, and this spring I was especially thrilled to find Lillian Faderman’s book, The Gay Revolution, on the list. It was enlightening, sorrowful and uplifting. I had grown up in the movement and yet there was much I didn’t know.
A man walks draped in a pride flag at the Jerusalem Pride Parade in July 2016.
At 16, I had the pink triangle on my bag, a “Stop Heterosexism” pin on my hat, and was reading Audre Lorde. While in college, I helped carry the banner in the first Pride Parade in my tiny town of Bangor Maine, and participated in early local meetings of PFLAG. I was vocal supporting my LGBT friends and celebrating National Coming Out Day when it was still new. At times, I was harassed or criticized for my stance; others simply assumed I was a lesbian and dismissed me. Both responses taught me a great deal, as well as my own privileged position.
I am not a lesbian.
Like all the other identities in my life, I skirt close to the edge without being part of any. My mother laughingly called me her “heterodyke” and a number of women in the community were interested in me, but I turned out to be (perhaps disappointingly) straight. It didn’t matter to my LGBT community at all, which taught me another valuable lesson about tolerance and acceptance.
As I wavered about joining the Jerusalem Pride parade that afternoon in the library, I thought about my personal history and the historical weight of Faderman’s book. But it was the notion of my students that decided me. What would they like to see? How could I bring this experience into the classroom?
Yet, as I joined the crowd, I realized I was there for a wholly different reason. This was my community. I needed to be there, for me. As we started to march, I started to cry, and the tension of two months of intense work in an armed city began to ease. I held out my phone so I could film every second. Sure, I took pictures for others, but to be honest, it was all for me.
Some 6,000 miles from my apartment in Cleveland, I had arrived home.
Lisa Nielson is the Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University.
This Halloween, families can share a treat that lasts longer than candy corn: “Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the Dead Calaveras.”
Author and illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh – his mother is Mexican; his father is American – came to Cleveland in September to accept a Norman A. Sugarman honor award in children’s biography for the appealing, 40-page picture book.
It tells the story of Mexican artist and printer Guadalupe (Lupe) Posada, 1852-1913, who drew important political cartoons. The subject is best remembered for his whimsical drawings of skeletons – Calaveras – that have become synonymous with the Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) festival.
“Skeletons riding bicycles . . . skeletons wearing fancy hats . . . skeletons dancing and strumming on guitars,” the book begins. “We call these festive bony figures calaveras. In Spanish, the world calavera [ca-la-VEY-rah] means “skull.”. . . The skeleton figures are not scary – in fact, they look as if they’re having fun.”
Tonatiuh – click here for the pronunciation and intricate backstory on his name – leaves open to his young readers how to interpret the art. A two-page spread takes pleasure in asking what Posada’s calaveras would look like nowadays.
Wearing jeans and a slate-colored shirt, Tonatiuh told his Cleveland audience that he hopes more people will learn about Posada. “He was very poor at the end of his life, so poor that he was buried in a mass grave,” the author said. “He drew the skeletons that are so famous but we don’t know exactly where his bones are.”
Using both Posada’s drawings and his own to illustrate this sophisticated biography, Tonatiuh gears the book to children ages 6-10, but this work is absorbing at any age. The contemporary artist draws figures only in profile; his distinctive style is influenced by the pre-Columbian art and scripts known as Mixtec codex. This makes “Funny Bones” instantly recognizable to anyone who has seen Tonatiuh’s other books, “Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote,” “Separate is Never Equal” and “The Princess and the Warrior: A Tale of Two Volcanos,” which came off the presses last month.
“Thousands of children’s books publish every year and very few deal with children of color, maybe three percent are Latino,” Tonatiuh said during the awards ceremony at the Cleveland Public Library. “I hope this book is one that children who celebrate the Day of the Dead are excited to share with their classmates.”
Tonatiuh told NBC News that “Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote,” an allegory for a dangerous border crossing, caused a group of fourth-graders in Texas to send him a video telling their own stories of migration.
“I think kids are extremely intelligent,” he told the broadcast outlet. “But I think that sometimes we don’t give them the credit they deserve.”
Mary Morris spent close to two decades crafting her jazz-soaked Chicago novel, The Jazz Palace, winner of this year’s Anisfield-Wolf award for fiction. “It is almost impossible for me to imagine that a book I began in 1997 is being recognized in that way, almost 20 years later,” she told the Playhouse Square crowd at this year’s ceremony. “Just for a cultural reference, Clinton was president and there were no cell phones.”
As is our tradition, we sat down with each of our winners during their Cleveland itinerary for a quick interview on what this recognition meant to them. Here is Morris’ turn in front of the camera:
“America is indelibly black-ish,” sociologist Orlando Patterson asserted to the audience at Playhouse Square during this year’s awards ceremony. “Trying to imagine America without blacks is like trying to imagine Lake Erie with no oxygen.”
Patterson continued his thesis on race and culture as he accepted the 2016 Lifetime Achievement award from his friend and colleague Steven Pinker. Jurors selected Patterson for his global scholarship over the past 30 years, with his 2015 book, The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, earning sharp praise.
Earlier that morning, we caught up with Patterson in a few quiet moments to get his thoughts on what winning an Anisfield-Wolf award meant to him. Take a listen:
Cleveland welcomed poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips to town by giving him a good sense of our hometown pride. Visiting only months after the city won its first championship in 52 years, Phillips arrived in a walking boot, as he was recovering from surgery on his Achilles. As he made small talk, he’d remark, “Better me than Lebron, right?” To his surprise, everyone responded: “Yes, definitely. Better you than Lebron.”
Phillips told this story from the stage at Playhouse Square, where he was collecting the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf award for Heaven. We found a few quiet moments to speak with Phillips during his busy Cleveland itinerary about what this award means to him both personally and professionally:
Brian Seibert, the New York Times dance critic and 2016 nonfiction winner for his book, What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing, is an accomplished tap dancer himself. At the close of his book reading, the final event of Cleveland Book Week, he slipped on his tap shoes and treated the audience to a powerful dance duet with Chandler Browne, an Oberlin College student. (Missed it? Catch it here.)
A day prior, we sat down with Brian Seibert for a brief interview on what winning the 2016 award for nonfiction means to him. Take a listen:
From the Playhouse Square stage, Lillian Faderman began her acceptance of this year’s nonfiction award with a story of how she discovered she won. After Faderman received an email from jury chair Henry Louis Gates requesting her phone number, her wife Phyllis Irwin remarked that he must be soliciting support for the Hilary Clinton campaign.
Neither considered that he would be reaching out to tell her she had won this year’s Anisfield-Wolf prize for The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. The skepticism was appropriate, Faderman remarked: “In the past, writers of LGBTQ history have seldom been recognized outside of our community as worthy of awards. So I’m doubly grateful to the AW jury for believing the time has come to regard LGBTQ history as part of American history.”
As is our tradition, we interview each of our winners prior to the busyness of the evening to get their quiet thoughts on what being recognized means to them. Here is Faderman’s reflection on what the award means to her:
When Lillian Faderman spoke at the City Club of Cleveland this September, she ably distilled her ample Anisfield-Wolf winning history, “The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle,” into a half-hour presentation with 20 minutes of questions. Her audience was diverse, and several members expressed awe over a 76-year-old pioneer who came out as a lesbian in 1956.
Among the listeners were 14 young adults enrolled in a seminar on philanthropy in America — all first-year students at Case Western Reserve University.
“Lillian Faderman has long been a hero of mine and her work has informed my own research on early modern women,” said their professor, Barbara Burgess-Van Aken. She called her decision to bring the class “a shamelessly selfish choice which I justified by thinking that I would be giving students exposure to a different sort of nonprofit organization. Little did I realize that Lillian’s topic would spark so much passion among my students.”
Here are snippets of their responses:
One aspect of her talk that I was very interested in was the transition of the movement from being secretive and submissive to being loud and determined. It was very interesting to hear about the secret groups LGBT members would form. Prior to today, I had a vague knowledge of the history of the LGBT movement, but I did not know many of the actual details. It is pretty amazing to see how small acts of bravery here and there soon led to marches and riots.
It was surprising to hear, however, that people can be fired due to their sexual orientation. I most certainly could believe this to be true years ago, but I was not expecting it to still be true. —Claire Nordt
Lillian Faderman’s speech felt more like having a conversation with a person than listening to a scripted talk. —David Kerrigan
One aspect that I enjoyed was that she went through the very early stages of the LGBT revolution. It surprised me that people back in the 1950s would rather be called communist than gay. I know this was during the McCarthy era where it was very, very dangerous to be communist, which made it even more surprising. I like how she did not just tell us this information, but she illustrated it with statistics, evidence, and anecdotes.—Karthik Ravichandran
My visit to the Cleveland City Club and Lillian Faderman’s talk was very enlightening. I actually was hesitant about the course that the talk would take; I didn’t know if it would be a boring speech that would go on a tangent rant, but I was pleasantly surprised that it was a very intellectual and heartfelt speech. —Hemen Aklilu
Ms. Faderman has obviously gone through a lot in her lifetime and it is amazing that she has had the courage and will to do all the work she has to help educate so many people on gay rights. Her presentation was very professional but at the same time very personable.—Kyle Lewis
The City Club of Cleveland hosted an honest and ethical ceremony where the voices of many were summed up by one incredible woman who has done her best to engage, educate, and empower those who listen to her to recognize the hardships that this community has faced and to realize all that there is left to go to truly free these people.—Jacqueline Abraham
Lillian Faderman’s speech was both informative and incredibly interesting. I personally did not know much about the history of gay rights and learned a lot from the experience. It really saddens me that United States history has so much bigotry ingrained in it. We are not really educated about the history of gay rights. In high school, I learned about African Americans’ struggle for equal rights, Native Americans’ plight involving the taking over of their land, and the racism Hispanics face. Never did I learn about the LBGTQ struggle. It is absolutely appalling to me that this demographic received so much hate.—Michael Rowland
Perhaps my favorite question that was asked was about what the proper terms to reference the gay community were. There are so many things out there and it’s hard to know as an outsider what the majority prefers. It can be extremely hard to follow and her response about both gay and LGBT being acceptable was very helpful. It was nice to see her take a light-hearted approach about the acronyms and how many there are to this day. — Anna Goff
I very much enjoyed Lillian Faderman’s idea that the black power movement of the 1960s inspired the gay rights movement to rise up and take action. I had never thought of this connection before, so it was interesting to hear her perspective on it and the influence she believes it has…. In general I was a little disappointed that she didn’t talk about the AIDS epidemic in more detail because personally I feel that it was a large part of the gay rights movement in the twentieth century. To her benefit however, someone did ask a question based on AIDS, which gave her a chance to say how important it was to the struggle for civil rights. —Claire Howard
The most interesting thing at this event was whether or not queer people should be considered a minority group. Some people think that gay people are not minorities because there is only one simple difference that divides them from the rest of this heteronormative society. But wouldn’t that be the case for all minority groups? We are humans with variations in race, nationality, ability, etc. These things are just simple differences like sexuality. People are not in a minority group because they feel like they are oppressed. They are in these groups because they are oppressed. Any minority group, whether it be queer or disabled people, has to try harder in order to succeed in a society that does not acknowledge their human rights. —Mya Cox
I have spoken at a Rotary Club event, and it was much more informal and simple. This event almost seemed like a small-scale TED talk to me. Upon looking at Ms. Faderman, I expected a serious, bland, but informative speech. Instead, Ms. Faderman was light-hearted, charismatic, and very informative in her speech. She started by saying, “I am going to recap my 800+ page book in a 30 minute talk.” Rather than spitting facts or quotes from her novel, she took the listeners on a trip through the history and important events of the LGBT fight.—Rohith Koneru
Faderman also mentioned that a lot of hate came from the religious side of things. Now I cannot deny that a lot of those against the LGBT community have association with religion but I was raised Catholic and believe in that faith. I went through Catholic schooling from preschool all the way through high school and not once was a taught to hate the LGBT community.—Jeremy Hill
One other notable topic I liked was her discussion of the media portrayal of gay men as rapists and lesbians as killers. While those no longer exist in the media today, the stereotypes of gays being pedophiles and the like still exist, and TV shows and movies hardly portray LGBT characters at all, and those that do usually make a huge deal out of them. ..
A final note was that I loved the picture of Frank Kameny shaking hands with President Obama in the Oval Office because in that one picture and that one gesture, the viewer is able to see just how far the gay rights movement has come and the progress that has been made towards true equality.—Tom Schlechter
Everyone–both pro or anti LGBT–could feel the passion and struggle of the community and actually sympathize with them. I do feel like I have learned something new about the community’s struggle and the fracture it encountered on a whole another level. I respected her passion and dedication to something she truly believed in even though it has been a long hard brutal fight until this point.
As a gay male, the whole presentation affected me on an emotional level. Also, I was pleased that she was not dismissive of other cultures and opinions, which a lot of people tend to do, but instead focused more on the story of the LGBT individuals. Generally, people have a tendency to make their group seem better than others, but Faberman was very respectful towards those of other groups. —Karthik Ravichandran
We have to work hard to make sure everyone has equal rights. The fact that people are still being discriminated against is terrible. We need to band together and change this. —Michael Rowland
.
Last week we celebrated the inaugural Cleveland Book Week (CBW), a series of special events to celebrate Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners past and present, and showcase people and organizations working to promote literature and literacy in Greater Cleveland. Throughout the week, in coordination with a number of community partners, we hosted an array of events to engage audiences of all sizes and interests. See what CBW was all about in this visual recap:
The Cleveland Flea goes literary
We kicked off the week with a special CBW Edition of the Cleveland Flea. In the CBW tent, local writers – including David Giffels, Eva Barrett, Dave Lucas, Ali McClain, Michael Clune, Aubrey Hirsch and RA Washington – read their work from the author’s stage. Nearby, local independent booksellers Appletree Books, Guide to Kulchur, Mac’s Backs and Loganberry Books set up shop.
Swapping books in Public Square
A free book swap on Cleveland’s Public Square drew an all-ages crowd for an afternoon of free books, ice cream, chalk art and live performances. Literary and literacy-focused nonprofit organizations shared information with attendees, and local libraries offered registration for new library cards. The afternoon was truly one for the books!
Celebrating this year’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Award-winning authors
Throughout the week, each of this year’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners was honored at their own event in the community. From a poetry reading in a planetarium, to a tap dance performances alongside local dancers, these author events gave Greater Clevelanders an opportunity to connect with this year’s Ansifield-Wolf Book Award winners through intimate and engaging programs.
A star-studded evening
The centerpiece of Cleveland Book Week 2016 was the 81st Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Ceremony. A sold-out crowd gathered at the Ohio Theatre in Playhouse Square to celebrate this year’s winners. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, who herself was feted at a CBW event the night before, hosted the ceremony.
There is a quote on the back of each menu at EDWINS Leadership and Restaurant Institute: “At Edwins, we believe in second chances.” Its founder Brandon Chrostowski, himself the recipient of a “second chance,” used his to help to change the face of prison re-entry in Cleveland.
The institute provides culinary training for incarcerated individuals – current and former. The idea is to lower obstacles that hinder their transition back into society. Classic French culinary techniques and basic managerial skills are served up in a six-month program at EDWINS Restaurant at Shaker Square in Cleveland and a nine-month program inside Grafton Correctional Institution.
The institute is the recipient of the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Memorial Award, $25,000 given each fall to a nonprofit community organization for outstanding service. The prize is administered by the Center for Community Solutions.
“EDWINS is providing an effective solution to a critical community issue by helping people before and after their release from prison to learn skills that can be used in their specific field — the hospitality industry — or transferred to other fields,” said John R. Corlett, president and executive director of The Center for Community Solutions. “And they are doing more by providing services to help them overcome obstacles that have a unique twist for those re-entering society after incarceration and for their families — such as access to basic health care, legal aid, literacy programs, transportation, and employment.”
The initiative has garnered stellar results in its first three years. The program boasts a 0% recidivism rate, and of its 127 graduates, 97 percent have found a job within 30 days of completing the program.
Now 36, Chrostowski remembers standing in front of a judge as a teen, rocked by the possibility of spending 10 years in prison. Instead the judge gave him one year probation. Chrostowski embraced this chance and found a chef who mentored him.
Now himself an accomplished chef, sommelier and a fromager, Chrostowski spent years working at fine dining establishments in New York and Paris before launching EDWINS in Ohio. For him, it’s important not to relegate the formerly incarcerated to the back of the house. “They are sous-chefs, cheese experts and maître-d’s,” he explained in 2014.
The name EDWINS comes from Chrostowski’s grandfather, a man his grandson said embodies the culture he works to cultivate at his restaurant. It’s also a shortened form of “Education Wins,” a philosophy that echoes through the kitchen and dining rooms of this unique nonprofit concern.
“No one forgets the taste of winning,” the founder told CNN. “It’s not on our tongue, but it’s in our soul, and it’s contagious. So if you can overcome a hard challenge here at EDWINS, it’s a win. It gives you confidence. That’s our secret ingredient.”
Welcome to the inaugural Cleveland Book Week, September 10-16, designed to make our region a literary destination. At the center is the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony, with innovative new elements on the new Public Square, and programs from Lakewood and South Euclid-Lyndhurst.
Cleveland Flea is taking on a literary tone September 10 and Public Square will be awash in books —and ice cream—September 12. People can bring a book, swap a book and find a free book that day, as well as hear performances by the Distinguished Gentlemen of Spoken Word and the Cleveland Association of Black Storytellers. The first 500 guests who present their library card will receive free ice cream. (No library card? No problem. Staffs of the Cleveland Public Library and the Cuyahoga County Public Library will register new patrons.)
Then the county library foundation will host novelist Don DeLillo on September 13 at Case Western Reserve University as part of the Writers Center Stage series. Librarian Bill Kelly will interview DeLillo.
Next up, Anisfield-Wolf juror and former poet laureate Rita Dove will return home for a special Wednesday evening celebrating the publication of her new book, “Collected Poems” and the 30th anniversary of her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, “Thomas & Beulah.”
If you missed reserving your tickets to the annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Award ceremony, know can still meet our 2016 winners at the smaller, more intimate events tied closely to the themes in their award-winning books.
“We hope more people will find more ways to engage with the books, and the broader mission of equity, reading and literacy,” said Karen R. Long, manager of the awards. “Cleveland is full of world-class readers, and deserves a literary scene to match. This year, our city has been a destination for basketball fans and politicos – why not bibliophiles? We hope to add more partners next year.”
These festivities are brought to you in collaboration with Brews + Prose, Cleveland Flea, the City Club of Cleveland, and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.
Saturday, September 10
Cleveland Flea
3615 Superior Avenue
9 a.m.-4 p.m.
Look for our pop-up bookshop and literary café, where you can sample coffee and cocktails while browsing rare books and first editions or mingling with some of Cleveland’s authors.
Public Square Book Swap
Downtown Cleveland
2:30-7 p.m.
Bring a book or buy one there, then mingle with other readers and swap books! Hear from local writers and poets on the speaker’s steps and peruse your new book while enjoying live music, food and drinks on the Square.
Don DeLillo, Writers Center Stage
Maltz Performing Arts Center
Case Western Reserve University
7:30 p.m.
Don DeLillo’s novels include White Noise, for which he won the 1985 National Book Award; Libra; Mao II; Underworld and Zero K. The critic Harold Bloom named DeLillo one of four living American literary giants.
Henry Louis Gates and Toi Derricote will be on hand to honor their friend and former poet laureate, Rita Dove. The Akron native will be celebrating more than three decades of poetry in front of an audience of hometown friends and family.
Our awards ceremony is currently sold out, but we encourage you to catch the livestream right here at www.anisfield-wolf.org, beginning at 6 p.m.
Friday, September 16
Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle
“A Very Long and (Almost) Victorious Battle: The Struggle for Gay Civil Rights”
The City Club of Cleveland
12:00 p.m.
The historian will chronicle the path to social, political and economic freedom for the LGBTQ community at this City Club forum. Get tickets
Do you remember being fifteen? Let Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson’s first adult novel in 20 years, jog your memory. In this gritty, coming-of-age tale, Woodson transports readers to sweltering 1970s Brooklyn, New York, as a young girl grapples with unbearable grief, friendship and lost memories.
When we meet August, she’s an anthropologist in her mid-30s who has returned to Brooklyn after a long absence to bury her father. She has an accidental run-in with an old friend — more like a sister, really — that triggers remembrances. The rest of the novel is a flashback to early adolescence. August narrates her own story.
We begin with eight-year-old August moving from a dilapidated Tennessee farm to New York City with her father and younger brother. The Vietnam War claimed her mother’s younger brother and the loss drove her mother to an early grave.
In those early days in Brooklyn, a trio of girls — Gigi, Sylvia, and Angela — soon become her confidants. The longing for connection is palpable, both to readers and her newfound friends.
What did you see in me? I’d ask years later. Who did you see standing there?
You looked lost, Gigi whispered. Lost and beautiful.
The new foursome blend so tightly that even their descriptions on the page feel fluid. The three girls become kin to August, the intimacy of their relationship soothing but never extinguishing her grief: “…I had Sylvia, Angela and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.”
They all navigate complicated home lives, short-lived romances and persistent predators, giving each other tips on how to protect their bodies. (They all know to avoid the owner of the shoe repair shop: He’ll offer you a quarter to see your panties.)
Woodson is a master at summoning small details — the glint of a wrench used to twist off a fire hydrant cap, the tips of toes hanging over the edge of too-small shoes — and at painting a portrait of a neighborhood in flux. There are no throwaway sentences in Another Brooklyn — each short, poetic line feels carefully loved and polished. The first half of this novel asks urgent questions; the second delivers uneasy, heartbreaking answers. At its core, this book is about fragility, how light shines in the broken places.
While most of the characters are vibrant and well-drawn, it is surprising that our protagonist is so mysterious. The readers don’t really know August beyond her grief. Woodson keeps the details scant: August is a protective big sister and a dutiful daughter. But what defines August, through all 170 pages, is her inability to cope with the foundational loss of her mother. Every page holds a dull ache.
Asked to name her influences by Booklist, Woodson said, “Two major writers for me are James Baldwin and Virginia Hamilton. It blew me away to find out that Virginia Hamilton was a sister like me. Later, Nikki Giovanni had a similar effect on me. I feel that I learned how to write from Baldwin. He was onto some future stuff, writing about race and gender long before people were comfortable with those dialogues. He would cross class lines all over the place, and each of his characters was remarkably believable. I still pull him down from my shelf when I feel stuck.”
Woodson has spent the last two decades crafting smart young adult fiction and poetry, most recently winning the National Book Award in 2014 for her poetic memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming. Woodson’s return to adult fiction doesn’t stray far from her comfort zone; minus a few scenes, Another Brooklyn would work entirely as a young adult novel. It is one that strengthens as the pages pile up.
In absorbing August’s journey, we’re reminded that our teenage selves still roam within, only tempered by time and adult responsibility. But Another Brooklyn brings them back to the forefront, asking us, Who were you when you were 15?
by Charles Ellenbogen
With all of the recent discussion about the changing faces on U.S. currency, some controversy emerged over a seemingly safe and definitely popular choice – Harriet Tubman. How many people, some asked, did she really lead to freedom? Do we really want the story of slavery memorialized on money? And, most persuasively, would Tubman herself have wanted this honor?
By not bringing up her name in his breathtakingly great new book, The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead, winner of the 2002 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for John Henry Days continues this conversation. Like most movements, the Railroad was made up of both the heroic conductors such as Tubman and the many nameless others who aided escaping slaves. Cora, Whitehead’s protagonist, and Caesar, who inspires Cora to run, make use of the Railroad on their escape.
But this is not Tubman’s railroad. Whitehead has, instead, imagined an actual train that runs underground. This is in keeping with Whitehead’s fictional moves elsewhere – he takes reality and winds it even more tightly to create a hybrid. This is not magical realism; this is Whitehead’s world. It is life intensified.
As with many journey stories, there are echoes of the Odyssey here. Indeed, Whitehead even has named a 10-year old former slave Homer. He drives a carriage for Ridgeway, a kind of Inspector Javert of slave hunters. Having failed to catch Cora’s mother, Mabel, Ridgeway is obsessed with capturing Cora, who is escaping from Georgia. Homer, having been freed, stays with Ridgeway; he has nowhere else to go. In fact, “Each night with meticulous care, Homer opened his satchel and removed a set of manacles. He locked himself to the driver’s seat, put the key in his pocket, and closed his eyes. Ridgeway caught Cora looking. ‘He says it’s the only way he can sleep.’” The soul aches. Absolutely.
While he does not shy away from the intricate details of suffering (you’ll want to look away, but you won’t), Whitehead’s language is both spartan and evocative. Near the novel’s beginning, Whitehead recounts the story of Ajarry, Cora’s grandmother being captured and sold. He explains that two “yellow-haired sailors rowed Ajarry out to the ship, humming. White skin like bone.” The language evokes the bones of the Middle Passage that Ajarry is about to take. We register the harshness – humming while taking someone to be sold – and the abruptness of the word ‘bone.’ The sailors, having lost their humanity, have become skeletons of human beings. When it comes to Whitehead’s writing, less is definitely more. Much more.
In the end, though, The Underground Railroad is not just Cora’s story. Or even the story of her family. It is a story about stories – the stories we tell each other, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories our documents give us, the stories we find in libraries and museums and on money, the stories that are forbidden to us, the stories of America. “Truth was a changing display in a shop window,” Whitehead writes, “manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.”
In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen offers a test of this premise. He suggests choosing one element in American history to track how it is treated in different sources over time. I chose John Brown. In some textbooks, he was absent or limited to a brief mention as a lunatic. In other texts, he earned several paragraphs and was depicted as a hero. “Cora blamed the people who wrote it down. People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident,” Whitehead writes. This happens in textbooks. Novels too. Whitehead has gotten the Underground Railroad wrong, deliberately wrong, but to fault him is to miss the point. We must look, and we cannot look away. Whether we read, see an exhibit or watch a movie, we should do both and we should ask ourselves why we need to do both.
Whitehead is already racking up acclaim for this novel. Oprah chose it for her book club. The New York Times chose excerpts from it for its first broadsheet. There are, I am sure, more prizes in his future.
And I am happy for Whitehead’s success. It is time to move past considering him as a one or two-hit wonder — he wrote Zone One and Sag Harbor — and to start considering his work as a whole. If you haven’t read any of his work, The Underground Railroad is a great place to start. Some reviewers have noted how the novel resonates with today’s headlines. While this is true, such comments diminish the book. This novel will outlast headlines. It speaks to the truths underneath them. I read The Underground Railroad and was moved. Things I thought I knew shifted, sometimes slightly and sometimes violently. I was spectator, bystander, and, as hard as it is to admit it, participant. The novel is a journey, from captivity to freedom, from south to north, from past to present. It’s quite a ride.
Charles Ellenbogen teaches English at John F. Kennedy – Eagle Academy in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.
There are 108 tally marks on the cover of The Fire This Time, the new essay collection that brings forth 18 perspectives from a new generation of writers, working in the tradition of James Baldwin. Each mark represents a black life lost too soon, a visual representation of the urgency of #BlackLivesMatter.
In the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in 2013, Jesmyn Ward went to Twitter to share her frustration, but found the platform too ephemeral. She was much more struck by the pertinence of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Ward, editor of this anthology, decided she wanted a book that “would reckon with the fire of rage and despair and fierce protective love currently sweeping through the streets and campuses of America.”
The results are mostly successful. The Fire Next Time contains a broad spectrum of essays that tackle everything from Phillis Wheatley’s mysterious marriage to Rachel Dolezal’s recent identity hoax, an engaging concoction of both the historical and contemporary. Eleven of the 18 pieces are original, with the rest published between 2014 and 2015.
The Fire This Time opens with Jericho Brown’s “The Tradition,” a 14-line poem that links the imagery of a brilliantly colorful meadow with the brutal deaths of John Crawford, Eric Garner and Mike Brown. Its early inclusion instructs us to get unsettled. (Brown won an Anisfield-Wolf book award last year for The New Testament.)
After a sturdy and moving introduction, the book falls into three parts – Legacy, Reckoning and Jubilee. In “Da Art of Storytellin’” Kiese Laymon’s fuses of his grandmother’s 30 years of hard work at a chicken processing plant with the Southern stank of Outkast’s Atlanta classics. Emily Raboteau criss-crossed four of New York’s boroughs to capture anti-police brutality murals in “Know Your Rights!” Isabel Wilkerson, who won a 2011 Anisfield-Wolf award for her Great Migration history, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” revisits 150 years of U.S. history in a slim three pages called“Where Do We Go from Here?” Her precise retelling comes with parting encouragement: “We must know deep in our bones and in our hearts that if the ancestors could survive the Middle Passage, we can survive anything.”
Still, reading most of these essays feels heavy. The collective thesis is that Black life in America, like Claudia Rankine posits in her essay, is “the condition of mourning.” But as Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote to his son, echoing the advice of generations before him: “That this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within all of it.”
Edwidge Danticat, who took home an Anisfield-Wolf award in 2005 for The Dew Breakers, closes the book with a powerful message to her two young daughters, born in the “Yes We Can” era of Barack Obama’s first presidential run. Danticat, born in Haiti and raised partly in New York, offers a view of refugee status — a position held both by immigrants and some U.S. citizens: “The message we always heard from those who were meant to protect us: that we should either die or go somewhere else.”
Still, Danticat fortifies her daughters against this, encouraging them to seek joy: “When that day of jubilee finally arrives, all of us will be there with you, walking, heads held high, crowns a-glitter, because we do have a right to be here.”
by Valentino L. Zullo, Teaching Fellow, Kent State University and Ohio Center for the Book Scholar-in-Residence at Cleveland Public Library
The Marvel universe is expanding once again — – this time making history. At the San Diego Comic Con in July, Marvel announced a new World of Wakanda series, penned by “Bad Feminist” author Roxane Gay, making this the first time in 77 years of publishing that a black woman has written for the comic book giant.
Sure, Marvel Comics has featured stories with powerful black female characters including Storm and Misty Knight (created by the local Cleveland author Tony Isabella), but not one has gotten her voice from a black female author. Are these recent developments truly progress?
As an avid reader of comics, and a frequent apologist, I had to wonder: how to think about Gene Luan Yang’s New Super-Man, the first issue of which was published this month by DC Comics, or the ongoing Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates? I soon realized, though, that while these stories were written by men of color, they were still men. Even the exciting news of a new Invincible Iron Man series, in which Tony Stark will pass the torch to a 15-year- old black girl, Riri Williams, was muted a bit by the fact that her creator, Brian Michael Bendis, is a white man. “A black woman won’t pick up the paycheck for a story about a black girl, especially after Marvel has reaped so much goodwill and praise for introducing one?” critic Abraham Riesman asked in response to the news.
Perhaps even more disheartening is the fact that while Yang, Coates and Gay represent change in terms of hiring in superhero comics, we must remember that this is not these are not their day jobs. None of them will be the backbone of the industry. They are just visiting. There is still much work to be done to insure that the pillars of the comics industry are representative of those reading the stories. Another problem — one too large for this blog — is the erasure of women and people of color from the annals of the comics industry. (Many forget already that Jenette Kahn was the President of DC Comics for nearly 20 years.)
Still, I do want to celebrate the moves toward diversity in the realm of superhero comics. There are more women working at Marvel than ever before. Indeed, I praise Sana Amanat as one of Marvel’s best editors, and G. Willow Wilson, Chelsea Cain or Kelly Sue DeConnick as some of their strongest creators. However, I believe that we can celebrate and also ask for more. It is also problematic when some of the most iconic black female superheroes are still written by white men and have never been written by a black female creator.
While black women may not be writing for Marvel en masse, they are indeed creating comics. You can find a list of creators at Ormes Society, named for Jackie Ormes, who was the first female African-American cartoonist to produce a syndicated comic strip. (You can learn more of her story in Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist.) Other notable black women include Felicia D. Henderson, who wrote for DC Comics with Teen Titans and Static Shock and Whit Taylor, who has won the Glyph Comics Award.
A panel from Jackie Ormes’ comic strip in the 1930s, Torchy Brown in “Dixie to Harlem”
Black women have been creating comics for decades, even as the major comics companies have not invested in their talents. Gay noted that she understands the role she’s occupying in history. “It doesn’t make sense that I’m the first, in 2016,” Gay tweeted. “But I won’t be the last.”
Join the conversation about women in comics at the Kent State University and Cleveland Public Library Wonder Woman Symposium in Cleveland September 22-24, 2016. See the website for the event info here: www.kent.edu/wonderwoman
The former poet laureate and Akron native will return to the region that raised her to celebrate her new “Collected Poems” and for the 30th anniversary of her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, “Thomas and Beulah.”
“An Evening with Rita Dove & Friends” serves as an intellectual appetizer for our 2016 awards ceremony, with jury chair Henry Louis Gates and all five 2016 winners — Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mary Morris, Orlando Patterson, Lillian Faderman and Brian Seibert — scheduled to attend. Poet Toi Derricotte, who won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for “The Black Notebooks” in 1998, will introduce her friend to a hometown crowd.
The evening is co-sponsored by Brews and Prose, the literary series.
Published in 1986, “Thomas and Beulah” is based loosely on Dove’s maternal grandparents and is set in Akron. It traces their lives through the birth of her grandfather Thomas in the early 20th century until the death of her grandmother, whose actual name was Georgianna, in the 1960s.
“This is the quintessential moment to celebrate Rita Dove in her beloved community,” said Karen R. Long, manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for the Cleveland Foundation. “She has served more than 20 years as an indispensable juror, and she has elevated American literature with her poems and teaching and editing. For most of us, that began with ‘Thomas and Beulah,’ which brought a black, middle-class, mid-American couple into our collective literary consciousness.”
The celebration begins at 7:30 p.m. on September 14 in the Maltz Performing Arts Center on the Case Western Reserve University campus. Tickets are free and parking is $7. Tickets for parking and for the event are available here or by calling 216-368-6062.
Riders heading to downtown Cleveland on the RTA’s Red Line may have noticed quite a few more pops of color adorning the city landscape over the past two weeks. The colors have a story, and each story comes from a work or writer in the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award canon.
Inter|Urban, the collaboration among the City of Cleveland, the Cleveland Foundation, North East Ohio Area Coordinating Agency, RTA and LAND studio, has filled the 19-mile stretch from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and into downtown Cleveland with bright, vibrant murals. Coming up in time for the Republican National Convention in July will be two photo installations. All the art is inspired by Anisfield-Wolf texts and writers.
Seventeen artists from around the world converged on Cleveland in June for a public art blitz, creating an outdoor gallery and anchoring installations at the airport and Terminal Tower. Eight artists are based in Cleveland, with the others representing South Africa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Hawaii, and Florida.
“This marvelous project moves the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards out into the city, showcased through original art spaced along the everyday paths of thousands of commuters,” said Karen R. Long, who manages the prize. “We expect the murals and the photography to start important conversations and serve as gateways to the books themselves, and the galvanizing ideas they contain.”
View the artworks below and hear from the artists in their own words how each piece came to be. Photos, unless otherwise specified, taken by Brandon Shigeta:
ARTIST: Aaron De La Cruz INSPIRATION: “Sophie Climbing the Stairs,” a poem from Dolores Kendrick’s The Women of Plums, which won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1990, and consist of poems in the voices of slave women. LOCATION: Lorain Avenue underpass
San Francisco muralist Aaron De La Cruz drew inspiration from a selection of Dolores Kendrick’s “Sophie Climbing the Stairs,” about an enslaved woman sneaking off to read. The passage evoked a memory of his parents speaking in Spanish to keep their conversations a mystery to the young De La Cruz and his brother. Drawing off the theme of literacy, his mural features deconstructed letters and punctuation marks.
ARTIST: Alan Giberson INSPIRATION: The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley, a 1966 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner LOCATION: W.25th and Columbus Street
Cleveland artist Alan Giberson’s mural came from a brief scene in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, when a New York Times reporter meets the civil rights leader for the first time. “Noblesse Oblige” is a French phrase referring the responsibility of those with privilege to extend generosity to those less fortunate. The artist, who specializes in hand-painted signage and gold-leaf lettering, was eager to tackle this project. “This was a big challenge, being the largest thing I’ve ever painted.”
ARTIST: Amber Esner INSPIRATION: The End by Elizabeth Alexander from American Sublime. The poet won for Lifetime Achievement in 2010. LOCATION: East 9th Street Wall, east of Tower City Station
Amber Esner, a Cleveland illustrator, was struck by Alexander’s ode to the dissolution of a relationship, as she lists the items left behind after a breakup. “My concept is based around the process of how people deal with loss by letting go of — or holding on to — specific objects,” she writes.
ARTIST: Margaret Kimball INSPIRATION: Martha Collins, White Pages The poet won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2007 for Blue Front. LOCATION: W.25th and Columbus Street
Cleveland illustrator and writer Margaret Kimball drew upon Martha Collins’ White Pages, a collection of untitled poems that explore white privilege and the ongoing racial divide in America. Kimball latched on to the repetition of the phrase “Yes, but” within the poem and used a minimalist color scheme to make one word prominent—YES. “The word is inclusive and strong and in this case has no strings attached, nothing to interrupt it,” Kimball writes.
ARTIST: Louise “Ouizi” Chen INSPIRATION: “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros, who won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1993 for her story collection that contains “Eleven.” LOCATION: Overpass Pillars, beneath I-480 & I-71. Photo by Louise “Ouizi” Chen
If you happen to be in the passenger seat as you’re driving to and from Cleveland Hopkins airport, take a look around to see if you can spot these 35-foot tall overpass pillars, designed by Detroit artist Louise Chen. “The totem pillars are a celebration of the way cultures represent themselves in the language of ornament, with design inspired by many different cultures spanning the world,” she writes.
ARTIST: Nosego INSPIRATION: A. Van Jordan’s “The Atom and Hawkman Discuss Metaphysics” from his 2007 collection, Quantum Lyrics He won an Anisfield-Wolf prize in 2005 for his collection M*A*C*N*O*L*I*A. LOCATION: Temple Façade, east of Tower City Station
The Philadelphia-based artist describes this piece, titled “Unmask,” as “a visual metaphor about self-awareness, self-reflection and perception.”
ARTIST: Osman Muhammad INSPIRATION: Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2011) by David Eltis and David Richardson & A Holocaust Called Hiroshima by Ronald Takaki, who won an Anisfield-Wolf award in 1994 LOCATION: East 9th Street Wall, east of Tower City Station
Cleveland artist Osmad Muhammad used his mural to make a statement about national and global atrocities. The burning woman in foreground is a reference to Hiroshima and the burning ships depict the slave trade throughout the Americas.
ARTIST: Ryan Jaenke INSPIRATION: Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes LOCATION: W.25th and Columbus Street
Published in 1951, Langston Hughes‘ Montage of a Dream Deferred reads like a jazz record, full of conflicting rhythms and short bursts of animation. Cleveland artist Ryan Jaenke took Hughes’ melody and translated it to this mural on Cleveland’s west side. Hughes won his Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1954.
ARTIST: Jasper Wong INSPIRATION: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2008 LOCATION: Old Abutment West, east of Tower City Station
Jasper Wong, Hawaiian artist and co-curator of the Interurban project, explored the themes of luck that featured prominently in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He peppered his mural with black cats and broken down cars (symbols of bad luck) and rabbits (symbols of good luck).
ARTIST: Ellen Rutt INSPIRATION: “The Danger of a Single Story” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 TED talk She won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for her novel “Half of a Yellow Sun” in 2007. LOCATION: Underpass pillars on I-90W
Detroit artist Ellen Rutt used bold geometric patterns to transform these underpass pillars. Her “Patchwork Cleveland” mural was inspired by Adichie’s call to avoid “making generalizations about culture based on a singular experience or limited knowledge.” When Rutt moved to Detroit in 2011, she quickly realized the broader narrative about the Rust Belt city was flawed. “It was in Detroit, surrounded by amazing street art, that my interest in murals grew from awefilled admiration, to an unstoppable desire and ultimately, an incredibly important part of my art practice,” she writes.
ARTIST: Darius Steward INSPIRATION: The Rain by John Edgar Wideman, who won a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 LOCATION: New East 9th Street Wall, east of Tower City Station
A Cleveland native, Darius Steward is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art. His mural features yellow as a primary color, the prominent color from John Edgar Wideman’s short story, “The Rain.”
ARTIST: Faith47 INSPIRATION: Language as a boundary by Wole Soyinka. He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1983 for his memoir Ake: The Years of Childhood, and again for Lifetime Achievement in 2013. LOCATION: Old Abutment East
South African artist Faith47 brought her international murals to Cleveland as part of her Psychic Power of Animals series, which attempts to “bring the energy of nature back into the urban metropolis.”
“There’s an inherent irony in recreating nature on cement, so the series is a nostalgic reminder of what we’ve lost but also an attempt to reintegrate that into the present,” Faith47 writes on her website. “We have become so distanced from nature, so these murals are an attempt to reconnect us with the natural world.”
ARTIST: Brendan Monroe INSPIRATION: The Boat by Nam Le This short story collection won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2009. LOCATION: Mirrored wall
San Francisco artist Brendan Monroe took cues from the dangerous sea voyage in Nam Le’s The Boat as he created this expansive mural. Look closely and you can see a child overboard.
ARTIST: Katy Kosman INSPIRATION: The short story “5 Dollar Bill” from Dorothy West’s collection The Richer the Poorer. West won our lifetime achievement award in 1996. LOCATION: New East 9th Street Wall, east of Tower City Station. Photo by Amber Esner
“My father and I had a complicated relationship like the one in the story,” Kosman wrote, “and he died when I was fairly young, but he taught me most of the lessons I use now in my everyday life.”
ARTIST: Pat Perry INSPIRATION: Edith Anisfield-Wolf, founder of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
If Edith Anisfield Wolf were alive today,” Detroit artist Pat Perry wrote, “I think she’d be encouraging us all to take direct aim at the great moral and social crises of our time. I can earnestly say that I think she’d be proud to see folks employing ideals taught to us by the past, in order to tackle issues of the present.”
Following in our tradition, each of our winners will speak at the awards ceremony, and each will talk and read separately in a second, more intimate setting in Northeast Ohio. Mark your calendars and make plans to join us in September for a string of these illuminating events, designed to bring readers and winners into each other’s orbits.
Mary Morris, The Jazz Palace South Euclid-Lyndhurst Branch, along with jazz pianist Jackie Warren and jazz trumpeter Kenny Davis
Cuyahoga County Public Library Wednesday, September 14
4-5:30 p.m.
Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle “A Very Long and (Almost) Victorious Battle: The Struggle for Gay Civil Rights”
The City Club of Cleveland Friday, September 16, noon Register here
Do you remember being fifteen? Let Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson’s first adult novel 
by Charles Ellenbogen
There are 108 tally marks on the cover of 
