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This week is the The Cleveland Foundation's sixth annual Cleveland Book Week, showcasing present and past Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (AWBA) winners over the 86-year history of the award. Established in 1935 by Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf, these awards recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity. The week’s far-ranging programs will all have virtual options and nearly all are free to the community.

>> More about the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards

We have a good selection of Anisfield-Wolf Award winners right here at the Michael Schwarz Library, thanks in part to a 2020 Celebrating Ohio Book Awards & Authors (COBAA) grant from the State Library of Ohio, which we used to purchase 28 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners not previously in our collection. A few of the additions to our collection made possible by this grant are listed below, but some 86 titles by a wide variety of authors are available for you to use and enjoy. Here's a representative sampling, followed by a complete list of our newer titles:

There There by Tommy Orange

ISBN: 9780525520375

Publication Date: 2018-06-05

As we learn the reasons that each person is attending the Big Oakland Powwow--some generous, some fearful, some joyful, some violent--momentum builds toward a shocking yet inevitable conclusion that changes everything. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle's death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle's memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will to perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss. There There is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. It's "masterful . . . white-hot . . . devastating" (The Washington Post) at the same time as it is fierce, funny, suspenseful, thoroughly modern, and impossible to put down. Here is a voice we have never heard--a voice full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. Tommy Orange has written a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. This is the book that everyone is talking about right now, and it's destined to be a classic.

Cover Art The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia by Mary Helen Stefaniak
ISBN: 9780393341133
Publication Date: 2011-09-19

As an epigraph from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois reminds us at the start of this novel, "Throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness."Protagonist Theo Boykin is a genius, an artist, an inventor, a Leonardo DaVinci-type, whose talents are sought after by local blacks and whites alike, but even this is not enough to save him. He falls victim to "the tragedy of ignorance and the damage caused by fear," in the words of poet Rita Dove--the first African American to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate and a member of the jury that conferred on The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia the 2011 Anisfield-Wolf Award for books that "make a significant contribution to our understanding of racism and our appreciation for the diversity of human cultures."You won't forget Theo Boykin, nor will you forget his friends the Cailiffs, especially Gladys, who tells this story with love and bewilderment, and the teacher, Miss Spivey, who changes all their lives.

The Women of Plums by Dolores Kendrick

ISBN: 9780688083472

Publication Date: 1989-07-01

From Library Journal: With an eloquence that exemplifies the beauty of the spiritual, Kendrick creates 34 black slave women who relate lives of appalling deprivation in lyrical monologues. Told in an earthy and uncontrived dialect, these memorable poems offer, not remote, idealized victims, but American black women of the 19th century making folksong poetry out of a terrible destiny: to be denied freedom, dignity, and humanity. Blending historical research (she uses Library of Congress and WPA recordings of ex-slaves) with a poet's deep feeling, Kendrick documents not only the tragedy of racial injustice but how plain country women, resisting self-pity, sustained dreams and compassion: "Soon I'll go for a stroll/ in my blue silk dress,/ go into town/ and buy myself a plum,/ the blackest from the bush."-- Frank Allen, Regents Coll., Albany, Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

ISBN: 9781443433471

Publication Date: November 12, 2013

From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris, the narrator of Half-Blood Blues, musician Sid Griffiths, leads the reader through a fascinating, little-known world and into the heart of his own guilty conscience. The bestselling, award-winning Half-Blood Blues is an entrancing, electric story about jazz, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves―and demand of others―in the name of art. Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues took the literary world by storm when it was first published, captivating readers and reviewers with its audacity, power, and sheer brilliance.

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

ISBN: 9781594633942

Publication Date: 2015-09-08

A "thrilling, ambitious . . . intense" (Los Angeles Times) novel that explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970s; In A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James combines masterful storytelling with his unrivaled skill at characterization and his meticulous eye for detail to forge a novel of dazzling ambition and scope. On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions in Kingston, seven unnamed gunmen stormed the singer's house, machine guns blazing. The attack wounded Marley, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Little was officially released about the gunmen, but rumors abounded regarding the assassins' fates. A Brief History of Seven Killings is James's fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time in Jamaica's history and beyond. Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters--assassins, drug dealers, journalists, and even ghosts--James brings to life the people who walked the streets of 1970s Kingston, who dominated the crack houses of 1980s New York, and who reemerged into a radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s. Brilliantly inventive, A Brief History of Seven Killings is an "exhilarating" (The New York Times) epic that's been called "a tour de force" (The Wall Street Journal).

A COMPLETE LIST OF BOOKS PURCHASED WITH THIS GRANT:

A constellation of vital phenomena : a novel / Anthony Marra
A life in the struggle : Ivory Perry and the culture of opposition / George Lipsitz
Amazing grace : the lives of children and the conscience of a nation / Jonathan Kozol
Brief history of seven killings
The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia : a novel / Mary Helen Stefaniak
Evangelist of race : the Germanic vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain / Geoffrey G. Field
The gay revolution : the story of the struggle / Lillian Faderman
Great house / Nicole Krauss
Gunnar Myrdal and America's conscience: Social engineering and racial liberalism, 1938-1987
The Guyana quartet
Half-blood blues
In the castle of my skin
The Jazz Palace : a novel / Mary Morris
Kind one : a novel / Laird Hunt
The Kung San : men, women, and work in a foraging society / Richard Borshay Lee
The Latin deli : prose and poetry / Judith Ortiz Cofer
Lessons and legacies : the meaning of the holocaust in a changing world / edited by Peter Hayes
Living Maya / text by Walter F. Morris, Jr. ; photographs by Jeffrey J. Foxx
My favorite warlord / Eugene Gloria
Parallel time : growing up in black and white / Brent Staples
Praying for sheetrock : a work of nonfiction / Melissa Fay Greene
Q : the autobiography of Quincy Jones
Rope burns : stories from the corner / F.X. Toole
Sweetbitter : a novel / by Reginald Gibbons
There there / Tommy Orange
The war before the war : fugitive slaves and the struggle for America's soul from the Revolution to the Civil War / Andrew Delbanco
What the eye hears : a history of tap dancing / Brian Seibert
The women of plums : poems in the voices of slave women / Dolores Kendrick

ANISFIELD-WOLF AWARD-WINNING BOOKS AT THE MICHAEL SCHWARTZ LIBRARY
(complete list)

ABOUT THE ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARDS

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures.

For 86 years, the distinguished books earning Anisfield-Wolf prizes have opened and challenged our minds. Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf established the book prizes in 1935, in honor of her father, John Anisfield, and husband, Eugene Wolf, to reflect her family’s passion for issues of social justice. Today it remains the only American book prize focusing on works that address racism and diversity. Past winners have presented the extraordinary art and culture of peoples around the world, explored human-rights violations, exposed the effects of racism on children, reflected on growing up biracial, and illuminated the dignity of people as they search for justice.

Originally sponsored by The Saturday Review, The Cleveland Foundation - the world’s first community foundation - has administered the Anisfield-Wolf prize since 1963.

More information at anisfield-wolf.org/

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Anisfield-Wolf Award-Winning Books at the Michael Schwartz Library