Poets & Writers is giving the 2024 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award to Laurie Halse Anderson, Roxane Gay, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, and the Champion for Writers award to Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books in south Florida.
Literary agent Eric Simonoff, who chaired the selection committee of current and former Poets & Writers board members, said, "We are thrilled to recognize three acclaimed authors who have shown dedication and fortitude in rebuffing attempts to ban books and silence authors. Their powerful and righteous voices have made enormous contributions to advancing freedom of expression--which is fundamental both to a thriving literary culture and a thriving democracy. We're equally pleased to recognize Mitchell Kaplan, who has been on the forefront of this issue as a bookseller, literary organizer, and advocate. It is essential that people of principle--like Laurie, Roxane, Nikole, and Mitch--stand up to protect the rights and freedoms we all treasure. Poets & Writers is proud to honor them for doing so."
The awards will be presented at Poets & Writers' gala on March 26, 2024, in New York City. Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, chair of the event, said: "We are proud to continue our support of Poets & Writers, and delighted to shine a light on writers and others in our industry who are fighting to preserve the right to read and be read, a core value at Penguin Random House."
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We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White (Astra House) has won the $15,000 2023 First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction.
Organizers said that "We Are a Haunting follows three generations of a working class family and their inherited ghosts: a story of hope and transformation. In 1980s Brooklyn, Key is a doula serving the Black women of her East New York neighborhood. She lives, like her mother, among the departed and learns to speak to and for them. Her untimely death leaves behind her mother, Audrey, who is on the verge of losing the public housing apartment they once shared and her son, Colly, who soon learns that he too has inherited this sacred gift and begins to slip into the liminal space between the living and the dead on his journey to self-realization."