 we want to thank you all for joining us here on this beautiful sunny day in the Bay Area, and San Francisco Public Library is honored to be the host of the Before Columbus Foundation's 42nd Annual American Book Awards and we truly mean that we are obviously huge fans of the literary arts and it gives us great pride to just be the house and host today. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homes of the Ramya Tushaloni peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that the Ramya Tushaloni understand the interconnectedness of all things that have maintained harmony with nature for millennia. We honor the Ramya Tushaloni people for their enduring commitment to war rep mother earth. As indigenous protectors of the land and in accordance with their traditions the Ramya Tushaloni have never ceded lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place as well as for all its people who reside in their traditional territory. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests we affirm their sovereign rights as first persons and wish to pay our respects to those ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramya Tush community. We recognize to respectfully honor Ramya Tush peoples. We must embrace and collaborate meaningfully to record indigenous knowledge and how we care for San Francisco and all its people. And in that link that I put in the chat box there's a list resource and reading list about first persons and particularly for Bay Area first persons. And as I mentioned we are all here to celebrate the 42nd annual American Book Awards. I just want to announce a couple two programs that we have coming at San Francisco Public Library and that's just one of many many you can find us almost every night in the virtual library. On September 29th we have readers from the 121st issue of Zizava's journal. So come check that out it's going to be good. And then on September 30th we partner with Moad for Woli Soyinka Soyinkas conversation with Sarah Manika and this is a ongoing series conversations across the diaspora. So we hope you'll enjoy some programs at SFPL. We have like I said almost every night and we are about to celebrate we are currently celebrating FIVA which is our Latinx Heritage Month and then we'll be going into Celebrating Filipino American History Month and we have lots of authors and lots of poets. So please take the time to join us and without further ado we are on to the American Book Awards. Very exciting. And today I'd like to turn it over to Justin DeMong Chairman of the Before Columbus Foundation and Administer of the American Book Awards. Justin thank you for being here and you're muted Justin. Ah yes. Well again thank you so much Anissa my name is Justin DeMong I'm the Chairman of the Board of Directors here at the Before Columbus Foundation and I want to thank our friends at the San Francisco Public Library event this year with SFPL. We began with a unique celebration of Miguel Algarine founder of the New York Recon Poets Cafe and Theater continued with a discussion with Lewis Gordon on his most recent work Freedom and Decolonization and continued with American Book Award winner Frank B. Wilderson in a discussion of his most recent work Afro-Pessimism which brings us to today the 42nd annual American Book Awards. The Before Columbus Foundation I believe presents a far more supple and welcoming vision of American literature than any other organization here in the United States. It is a garden that we have cultivated and grown and harvested from from many many seasons since 1976 and it was founded by one of the towering presences in international arts and letters Ishmael Reed. Many of America's greatest writers have passed through as members of our board of directors including the great Rudolfo Anaya poet David Meltzer and today on our board of directors we have Joy Harjo poet laureate of the United States of America the former poet laureate of the United States of America Juan Felipe Herrera the novelist Arlen James as well as one of our country's foremost essayists and novelist Layla Lalami and many others some of whom you'll be meeting today as part of our celebration. I want to emphasize that as words such as inclusion and diversity and equity have more recently become transformed into terms of political expediency or buzzwords in the popular culture that it was in fact the Before Columbus Foundation that was charting and seeding this new ground decades ago far before these became corporatist careerist buzzwords it was in fact the Before Columbus Foundation which was sewing this ground and were it not for the American Book Awards I don't believe that the current trend towards diversity in American publishing would have ever occurred there are many scholars and historians of literature that would agree with that and I think today's collection of American Book Awards winners serve to emphasize that fact so in considering this very nourishing visionary literature I would like to turn to our president president before Columbus Foundation Wahajat Ali who will be sharing some of his thoughts as we formally begin the 42nd annual American Book Awards. Thank you so much Justin for those kind words and thank you everyone for joining us on a Sunday afternoon when you could be watching NFL football games which you might be watching right now on another screen but that's fine that you've joined us for the 42nd annual American Book Awards hosted by the Before Columbus Foundation now very briefly for those of you who have never come to our word ceremony I just want to explain what we do what we are and how these American Book Awards work the Before Columbus Foundation was founded in 1976 as a non-profit educational and service organization dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature and Justin I agree with them that deal with these words diversity and equity and inclusion and multiculturalism now that they have become fashionable well we were talking and writing and celebrating this thing called diversity and multiculturalism before they became a popular term in HR departments all across America or before it became known as Mexican pizza and Asian fusion cuisine notice respect to Mexican pizza and Asian fusion cuisine but to truly be diverse and multicultural we need more than just postcards and slogans and hashtags and posters posters we need to do the work and specifically we need to invest in cultural workers those men and women who choose to invest their time and their talent in expanding and stretching America to accommodate recognize uplift and appreciate those many voices and communities and cultures that have always worked to make this country be and become but these voices have often been silenced sidelined ignored censored or banned and like many of you I'm sure you've heard we allegedly live in a post-racial society I heard that in 2008 after we elected our Muslim brother Barack Hussein Obama apparently we lived in a post-racial society so the rest of us had to stop whining and complaining but right now I'm in Virginia and Alexandria and close by there's Loudoun County Loudoun County is one of the wealthiest counties in the United States of America and one of the last counties to end segregation and and to actually desegregate excuse me it's public school system Loudoun County is ground zero for the national ban on CRT critical race theory which last time I checked was not being taught in elementary schools there's no economic anxiety in Loudoun County but there is a lot of cultural anxiety and for those who say well just get over it and stop this conversation about diversity and equity and everything's perfectly fine we voted for Obama and everyone likes Beyonce I give you Loudoun County I give you the ban on CRT and I give you the aggressive assault on our education seeking to censor and silence those voices those communities whose struggles have basically define this country the growth of this country on whose back the rest of us have been able to achieve some sliver of the American dream this fight is ongoing it has not ended and for many of us the way we fight is that we write and so the American Book Awards is meant to celebrate these authors these writers these poets today whom we will be awarding whose words seek to explain uplift redefine and reimagine this place and this idea called America or as my parents said America now how the ABA works you'll notice there's no first place second place third place is not the Olympics there's no gold medal silver medal bronze medal and that's deliberate on purpose every winner is treated equally it doesn't matter whether or not you are a self-published author it doesn't matter if you're a first-time author it doesn't matter if you won many awards it doesn't matter if you were the from the big three or big four publishing companies what matters is your word the quality of the word so you'll see next time hopefully next year if this country gets its act together and stops eating horse paste and gets vaccinated and takes this pandemic seriously we'll all be together as a community in San Francisco and you'll see all of the winners share the stage equally there's no quota system the reason why you see a diversity of ethnicities and voices and opinions is because it reflects the diversity of the board which i'll get into in a second we don't give preference to anyone who's from a major publisher or even who's self-published and we do not focus on whether or not it's a novelist or a non-fiction book we've also awarded poetry we've awarded graphic novels we really want to award a children's book oral storytelling again it's the word that is elevated and so for all of you right now who are winners and whose publishers and family members and friends are here please let it be known that you deserve to be here it is your work that has brought you here in such a gust company and it is a gust company because again we are 42 years strong and for many people this is the word they covet an award that is given to them by a writer's award that has oftentimes launched people an award that is dear to the heart of many celebrated authors and writers and poets and just briefly touched upon our board i want to flex a little bit and tell you about our board our board includes Joy Harjo, Marlon James, Simon Ortiz, Layla Lalami, Sean Wang, Ishmael Reed, Nancy Carnival, Jenny Lim, Juan Felipe Herrera, Nancy Mercado, Margaret Porter-Troop, Mary Anderson, Carla Branded, Justin DeMang, Sean Hill, TJ English, Victor Hernandez-Cruz and Lawrence Distani. We have MacArthur Geniuses on this board, we have Pulitzer nominated authors, we have the current Poet Laureate and we have the former Poet Laureate, we have playwrights, poets, scholars, historians, authors and even a guy like me who wore makeup on TV for a living and the process goes that we have hundreds of submissions every year. We get down together as a group, we select it, we debate it and then these are the final books that we agree as a group are deserving of the American Book Awards. Before I introduce the first American Book Award recipient today, please indulge me for a moment. You'll notice that we have a different vibe, we have a West Coast vibe. I don't wear a tie, Justin didn't even bother wearing a jacket and no one judges him. If you were to see us as a community and we were in person, people bring their parents, people sometimes bring their pets, we have kids running up and down, there's laughter, there's crying, that's the way it should be. Art and words should be celebrated by the community, for the community. Oftentimes, not always in New York, there's a certain class that is invited to these prestigious August Awards and we have deliberately tried to open it up, open up America, open up American literature and so I hope you invest in that culture of openness and as such we're working on this but we don't have the big fancy grants and the foundation grants yet. Oftentimes, this is the blood, sweat, and tears of men and women like Justin and Gundar and others who do it for free. Sometimes, if you've gone to the American Book Awards in the past, Ishmael Reid literally just gives out a hat and it says, all right guys, wherever you guys got put in the hat, it goes to the American Book Awards and Before Columbus Foundation. We have evolved and now we have a PayPal and a website. So if you're watching right now and you have a few dollars to spare, notice that the Before Columbus Foundation is a nonprofit, it's going to be tax deductible, please go to our website, www.beforecolumbusfoundation.com, go to support the BCF, give whatever you can or if you have PayPal, please go to our Gmail before CF at gmail.com and give what you can. Everything helps. No one gets rich off this. It all goes back to the literature, to the word, to the art, to the artists. Now, hopefully I've answered all your questions. Let's kick off the American Book Awards with the first award winner, Ayad Akhtar, who is receiving the American Book Award for his brilliant novel, Homeland Elegy, published by Little Brown & Company. And we've heard a lot about elegies in the past 20 years. We've heard about, apparently the Rust Belt and JD Vance and his Hillbilly Elegy, even though JD Vance is a corporate titan of who makes tremendous amounts of money and his Hillbilly Elegy has been renounced by the people who actually live in the Appalachians whose collection of essays we awarded a few years ago. But there's been an elegy for the rest of us that has been ignored. As we encounter and have just survived the 20th anniversary of the endless war on terror, we are finally as a country grasping with the consequences of that war on terror. Some of those communities who are hazed and scapegoated and the impact that the war on terror has had on fellow Americans who are seen as enemies. And Ayad Akhtar's fictional novel, a creative novel which sometimes mixes the memoir with satire, with the personal, is a story about how that enduring war on terror has brought about fissures in this country, in our psyche, in what it means to have the American Dream, who gets to achieve it. And he talks about the schisms that led to Trumpism, that led to Trump that we're still dealing with right now, through the personal story of a father and a son, a Pakistani Muslim immigrant father and his American born son, and how they chart a course through pain, grief, and eventually healing. And so it is our honor to award Ayad Akhtar's Homeline Elegy. And here's Ayad with a brief video. Take it away, Ayad. I'm very honored to receive this award and particularly thrilled to have been selected by a jury of fellow writers. I want to thank the Before Columbus Foundation and just want to express my gratitude. So thank you so much. Okay. Our second award, These Ghosts Are Family by Maisie Card. This multi-generational novel peels back the historic wounds inflicted by the trauma of slavery with its horror show of sexual abuse, rape, trafficking of black women, through the lenses of the daughter of a slave owner and two slave families affected by miscegenation and a birthright lie. When Abel Paisley's best friend, Stanford Solomon, dies in a workplace accident, the overseers mistake him for his friend. Well, Abel seizes on the opportunity to assume his dead friend's identity to escape his troubled life. His wife, Vera Paisley says, death is just one long therapy session. You have gone over every second of your life and divided them into the misery you caused and the misery others caused you. Hippocrates, all of them, most of the whites here have both legs so deep in the pit of slavery, how can they think they can come out pure? So says pet of faith, daughter of the sugar and rum plantation slave owner, Howard Fowler of Harold Town, Jamaica. Like the Alabama women of G's Ben, whose quilts trace their ancestral histories back to the cotton fields, Maisie Card weaves a family quilt that sweeps the reader into the hearts and minds of her characters and the ghosts which haunt them in this tangled web of deceptions, crimes, murders, lies, coverups that was part and parcel of colonial slavery. We need no history lesson or ancestral DNA to unpack the dirt. We just need to disinterer the stories that Maisie Card definitely spins in her epic debut. Maisie Card. Thank you. Thank you so much to the Before Columbus Foundation for this honor. When I first started writing this book it felt like a very personal project. You know I was thinking about the distance and the silence that existed within my own family and I was thinking about you know all the ways that we kind of rewrite history to make the present more tolerable. You know I didn't know if it would be published and whether it would kind of resonate with anyone. You know so I would really like to thank my agent Monica Odom for believing me and for supporting me and for signing me. I'd also like to thank my editor Christine Pryde and also the team at Simon & Schuster specifically LaShonda Nakua and Don Davis and Heidi Meyer. I would also like to express my appreciation to all the writers who encouraged me while I was working on this novel. You know some of us are not raised to believe that we could be writers or that we could be authors so you know every word of encouragement really meant a lot to me. You know I would especially like to thank Elizabeth Bobrick, Joshua Hinkin, Ernesto Mestre, Victor LaValle, Caitlin Greenwich, you know as well as the people who read many many early drafts especially you know Betsy Nervayas, Merrill Branch McTiernan, Lydia Zoga and Carl Schwartz. You know I'd like to also thank my family especially my grandfather, Willie Goldberg who died last year and who really inspired this book. You know and thank you to everyone who's read the book and reached out to me to say that it resonated with them and thank you you know again for this honor and everyone watching. I'm sure your grandfather would have been very proud of you this moment and his spirit is here I'm sure. Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody. Anthony Cody performs an autopsy of the US's sordid border history and poetics that dissects the white imagination and its racist perceptions of the other. In this case the faceless brown Mexican as servant, slave, migrant farmer, outlaw, outcast property and prey. With poetry interfaced with old public records government edicts news articles and editorials that frame xenophobia and its trail of corpses from the 1800s till present the persecuted and oft hanged victims of white racism are remembered dismembered and mourned. Cody reminds us sadly that their descendants are still among us languishing in migrant camps border checkpoints detention centers crossing our deserts to reach the land that once had no borders. Congratulations to Anthony Cody for this haunting debut Borderland Apocrypha. Thank you so much Jenny for that introduction. Thank you for one for writing that. Before I begin I want to acknowledge that I'm zooming today from the traditional lands of the Yocats here in was now Fresno, California. I pay my respect to the native elders both past and present to land itself. Each of us present continue to acknowledge and honor the true stewards of these lands and the land itself. I want to thank the War Columbus Foundation and the board. So many life altering voices have come before me that you have honored and I'm thankful to be here alongside them as well as everyone here today including shout outs to Carolyn Portia and Kathy Park on two literary heroes that I've been watching for so much of my life. I first learned about the American book award from Juan Felipe actually I was in his class learning about my literary canon where you do in ethnic studies Chicano Latin American studies to be more specific. He said go read Andres Montoya. I opened the book I read and I read and I resonated to me in a way that never had before. For the first time in my life it was as if not only where my story is being told but maybe I too could be a poet could be a writer and I think that's important because for someone like me coming from a very rough part of southeast Fresno living next to a highway it often sounds like I'm living in a Garcia Marquez novel where bodies show up where trash is dumped where more people are murdered on my street than I've ever graduated from a from a college let alone an MFA. And I think about that a lot and that weight and I'm reminded of how fortunate I am to have parents like Mary and Douglas who are turning in today my Aunt Jenny my late grandparents Dolores Walter Isabelle Antonio they sacrificed so much so much for me my brother Joseph my cousins Michael and Mary that it helped me understand and know that everything I do has to move us forward has to find a way to be for I have to find a way to be able forever thankful to them to know that even though we had so little that we had to push forward and find more and then on top of everything else this year has been so these last few years have been so heavy and rough I still don't even know how to thank everyone all the people that have come before me to help put this book into the world so I just want to just run down a few lists of folks. I want to thank my publisher Omnidon Rusty and Ken for doing all the hard work for years pushing out literature here in California to my first teacher and unofficial professor Tony Rudd to Mae Mae Burson-Brugge for picking my book for Cantomundo, Carmen, Celeste, Deborah, Norma, Noemi Press, the Hmong American Writer's Circle, El Tayar and Bernardo Palombo in New York, the Laureate Lab with Juan Felipe and all the all the labbers and then mostly to my first reader, Maidur Vang. I'm so fortunate to have a life with her and navigate the labyrinth of whatever it is that we're doing in this world of poetry. To close I just want to say I wrote Borderland Apocrypha thinking about how the truth of those prevailing narratives of the lynched Mexican and Mexican-American after 1848 were so easily swept away. How words like lynching and vigilance committees become palatable, Southwest histories when replaced with words like acquisition, expansion and justice as they arrive in the present and manifested so heavily and difficult and full with horror. How easy it becomes to scatter our histories so that we are never made whole. How we are endlessly assembling the stories of our communities and archives to seek and to know and sometimes it's horror and sometimes it's fruitful but always it remains a necessity to illuminate our true wholeness. Thank you so much. I'm honored to be here with you all today. Thank you so much, Anthony, Cody for joining us this afternoon. We have the pleasure and the honor of Ben Ehrenreich joining us as well today and his book Desert Notebooks, a roadmap for the end of time. Here in the United States and throughout the planet earth we increasingly find ourselves in a situation not unlike that of battlefield triage in which everyday decisions will determine the life and death of us all. Across the planet there are over 67 million who are displaced from their homelands and internally from war, from famine and increasingly from global warming and the disasters of a deteriorating climate environment. Ben Ehrenreich's beautiful and noble work, Desert Notebooks, a roadmap for the end of time, is not unlike the text that we might find from a figure in antiquity that is familiar, that of the wounded healer. In many ways the book is a laying on of the hands to excavate and salvage and attune and to resuscitate the spirit and keep us spiritually intact. It is a work of great courage and again of great nobility and it's a tremendous honor to present the American Book Award to Ben Ehrenreich and I'm very happy to welcome him to this afternoon's ceremony. Thank you, Jessica. I'm blown away by the introduction and I'm still completely blown away to be here today accepting this. I'm beyond humbled to be honored along with the other writers who are honored here today and I want to thank a few people. First my good friend and literary agent Gloria Loomis who's stood by me for a very long time now. My editor and publisher, Dan Smetanka, at Counterpoint Books, Counterpoint Press, for taking a chance on this book and on me and for the wisdom and care that he and everyone else at Counterpoint gave to it. I have to thank the Black Mountain Institute and everyone there with that whose support I would never have been able to write this book and I want to thank Olivia Watson, my partner in this larger endeavor for her love and laughter and for keeping me going. I did prepare something to say my partner had suggested that I try to make it funny but it's not that funny so I hope you'll bear with me. I began writing desert notebooks in 2017. You remember I'm sure who was president then and I'm sure I don't have to remind anyone what those years felt like. It was getting hotter, of course, and I wrote this book because I needed to understand all of that and how it came to be but also because I needed to know why I was writing and how and if writing could matter in such a world as this one and the conventional answers to those questions had never felt so lame to me. In the two years that have passed since I finished writing it, the urgency of those questions has only increased and I'll admit that in the isolation and grief of this last year and a half I have at times forgotten the answers that seemed so clear to me under the desert skies while I was writing this book so I'll try to speak them aloud now in a more direct fashion than I usually allow myself to. For many of us the enduring memory of the last 18 months will be the pain of separation but the real lesson that the pandemic and the climate crisis have been teaching us in the starkest demonstration imaginable is that we are not in fact alone. People, animals, plants, microbes on the far side of the planet can turn our lives inside out in a matter of hours. The actions of strangers and their failures to take action affect us intimately and irreparably. The virus and the fires and the storms have all been making it very clear that no one can survive alone that there is in fact no such thing as alone not in this universe at least. The conceit that has sustained the last 400 years of history conceived as progress that some the white ones the rich ones can survive and thrive at the expense of all the others has been exposed by a minute stretch of RNA and by the angry weather of the earth as the suicidal lie that it always has been. But knowing this does not get us very far. We may not be alone but we live as if we were and the radical solidarity that these times demand is at the moment so fantastical that it can feel absurd to even speak about it. As much as we might like to, as much as we might flatter ourselves, writers cannot create the love, rage and courage out of which such solidarity is made. The kind of commitment to one another that we desperately need to forge is one that reaches across the idiocy of borders and the sickness of race and it shakes off the delirium that convinces us that everything on this planet is dead and dumb except for human beings. Such solidarity can only be built collectively. It will be forged if it is forged by standing together in the ways that our ancestors and many of us too have stood together over the years arm and arm against police lines and courts and prisons and the labyrinths of lies without which they cannot be sustained. As writers, we can do our bit to counter those lies but real solidarity is born in action by being there for one another until we break through the fear and mistrust that let us imagine that we were ever alone. But writing isn't useless yet and truth is not just a word. If it was, it wouldn't be so violently policed. The waters are rising we know that but beneath the surge of the rivers and the seas it is still sometimes possible to catch a glimpse of something golden. If you're full enough to dive in after it and what is a writer but just such a fool, you'll find that it's not something you can drag up and stuff into your pockets. Each gleaming bit links to another one. If you follow one to the next with tenacity and love, you'll find that the chain they form is but one small thread of a glimmering net that appears to have no end and that's so big that it connects all of us to one another that everything that has come before us to the futures that we cannot yet see is impossibly strong and intricate and beautiful but its strength, intricacy, and beauty are not beyond words. Words are what we writers have. With words we can let pasts that have been silent speak. We can map connections between supposedly disparate phenomena. We can retrace paths that have been meticulously erased. We can center stories that have been kicked to the margins. We can resurrect the dead. We can imagine an infinity of futures other than the one to which we have been told that we are doomed. This is all to say that at this moment, if we're worth anything, us dumb, proud, vain, goofy-ass writers, we won't mind the violence of the current or the sucking mud beneath. We'll dive in deep and search for the shimmer of that net so that others may catch a glimpse of it. To remind them and ourselves to hold tight to the hands that are squeezing ours already. To remember that no matter what we've been told and no matter what it feels like, none of us is alone here. Thank you again. It's just an extraordinary honor to be here with you all. Thank you so much Ben, Aaron, Reich. In recent years, many of the most backward and criminal elements in American politics have been able to achieve extraordinary power. But it isn't any accident that part of that momentum has come out of a so-called two-party system. This oscillation between Jekyll and Hyde, which created the space for these backward and criminal elements to take up so much power. Indeed, in a recent attempt at a coup, many of the co-conspirators, some of them governors over states, some still in the Senate, continued this oscillation between Jekyll and Hyde. But one of the things that both parties agree upon is that they and they alone should run the United States government and thus this country. And along with that, there has been over the last decades a violent historical eraser of a period in American history from the late 1960s through the early 1970s. An attempt to flatten out and erase this history, largely in an effort to encourage a vision of this period that political revolution is not possible. During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, indeed, we approach the precipice of political revolution. And that is precisely why such works of militant scholarship, as we honor today, the young scientists, are so critically important. In fact, it was that period of time in which the vision that is embodied today by the Before Columbus Foundation came into being. It is the reason why the American Book Awards were created precisely for books such as this, precisely because it is up to us to bring these books into being and to tell the true history of our nation, its peoples, and the struggle for self-determination among those peoples. It is a great, great honor to welcome scholar Joanna Fernandez to the American Book Awards and, again, honoring her book, The Young Lords. Joanna, thank you so much for being with us today and thank you for sharing your wisdom. Yelza, okay, thank you. We're among writers, not the Northeastern elite that polices the profession or the calling, really. I'm honored. Thank you, Justin, for that introduction. I'm honored to be among my heroes. The folks who've gotten this award include, there are many, but the ones that I model my work after, Gerald Horn, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Robin Kelly, Edward Said, Lord, Toni Morrison. This is really an incredible honor. Thank you for doing this work for so long, the Before Columbus Foundation. And thank you, writers, for taking the time away from your writing to do this laborious work. I don't even know where to start because I didn't even know this was happening. This crazy thing happened to me. I spent the week in a hospital and just got out. But maybe that's a good place to start. The Young Lords, in their activism as the Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party, they dreamt bold dreams. They prefigured the new society in the activism and organizing they did in East Harlem and Chicago in the Bronx. They occupied a hospital in the Bronx in 1970 to dramatize the horrific conditions of health under which Black Americans and Puerto Ricans were being treated at a moment in the post-World War II period where profit became the primary modus operandi of the healthcare system in the United States. The moment when technology and machines and specialization undermined the centrality of humanity and the patient in healthcare. And that is something I lived and experienced in the hospital. There were plenty of tests and fancy machines and often very little attention to the patient. And we know that American medicine is organized around private medicine at the expense of public health. And the fallout is tremendous. The Young Lords drafted the first known patient Bill of Rights, which essentially established the parameters for how people should be treated and they called for free healthcare on demand and healthcare for all. They were anti-capitalist, self-proclaimed socialists and they believed that we could do better as a society. They believed that the fight to save the environment was a fight where people were at the center of that struggle. They were among the first activists and organizers to expose environmental racism. And so much more. The book is a lot better than the speech. I want to thank, I haven't thanked the press yet and my editor in particular, Brandon Perolla, for reading the manuscript and immediately say, yes, this is it. I understand it. It goes. We publish. I want to thank the people who funded me for many, many years. Ideally, I made a film about a political prisoner, while writing this book. I did everything under the sun but write the book. But finally, I wrote it during these many years. El Centro de Estudios Puerto Ricanos was critical to my research. The Schomburg Center funded my research and my work and gave me important time off. Very importantly, the Center for African American Urban Studies and the economy at Carnegie Mellon. And Manning Maribel was my dissertation advisor a million and one years ago. Many, many years ago, the late Manning Maribel. And I was a student in the history department at Columbia without funding and the Institute for Research in African American Studies funded my work, my PhD work at Columbia. And I think I haven't mentioned that anywhere publicly. I think that there's just articulating. The Young Lords inspired me to stay the course. Their history, their courage, their dreams were fierce. And I also have my father to thank. My father was orphaned at the age of six in the Dominican Republic. He was an incredible man. And he was my ethical compass. And I was one of those kids who was born in the United States, but English was my second language because no one spoke English at home. My parents still don't speak English. So language is this incredibly important thing. I got left back in second grade because I couldn't speak English. And so language becomes this monster that I have to slay. But it also becomes this beautiful thing. And it represents Latin America, my not knowing it, my parents, their struggles in this country. My father died. My father died in a Bronx hospital because of the botched medical care in a Bronx hospital. He was saved for a minute in a ruling class Long Island hospital, where I was at for a week, just this week. And in many ways, this history I write about, because the Young Lords did an enormous amount of work around healthcare and poverty, and the rise of medical empires in the United States in the post-World War II period. It's just crazy that this history I wrote about, about the deadly consequences of healthcare for profit would come to my doorstep. I finished the book right after my father died. He's probably, he's the most important person in my life. He's my Alpha and my Omega. And if this book is worthy of this award, it's because of his work in this country. It's because of the values he instilled in me and his determination to be an ethical being in the world and to be a value to society. He wasn't a self-proclaimed socialist, but he was definitely an organic intellectual and had socialist proclivities. Thank you so very much for this work that you do, for doing it for so long, and for amplifying the voices of writers of all walks of life. Thank you. Thank you so much, Joanna Fernandez. In darkness, in darkness however terrifying the eyes, the vision looking out, find light, find light somewhere in corners that would not otherwise be visible were it not for the prevailing darkness. In many ways, I think it can be said that this harvesting of light is the function of poetry. That poetry cannot only revive and resuscitate the human spirit, but also show the cohabitation and co-mingling of that spirit with all things even under great duress, even in darkness. It takes an extraordinary agility of the imagination, a deeply sensuous agility of the imagination to commit to such extraordinary poetry and power as we find with Caroline Fourchet in the lateness of the world. It is a poetry that speaks with tremendous authority of feeling and again a deeply sensuous agility of the imagination that, as I mentioned earlier with Ben Ehrenreich, helps us to rediscover what is salvageable, what can be excavated, and indeed what it is that makes our lives worth living and sharing with each other with love and respect. So it is a great honor to welcome Caroline Fourchet to the ceremonies this afternoon. Again, American Book Award winner for In the Lateness of the World. Caroline, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you, Justin, for that wonderful introduction. I'm speaking to you from the traditional lands of the Piscataway and the Cotchtank peoples. I thank all of you who join us this afternoon in this celebration, the second to be held during this devastating pandemic that has afflicted the whole of humanity. I have followed the work of the Before Columbus Foundation throughout the past 42 years and was even able to be a member of the audience at an early ceremony. There is no greater honor for me than to be recognized by writers, poets, and playwrights whose work has reflected clear awareness of the world for the whole of their lives. The members of the board of Before Columbus Foundation are a litany of those whose courage, vision, and artistry have transformed literary culture. I greet them today and thank them for everything they have written and everything they have done. The French Resistance poet Robert Desnos, who fought in clandestinity, wrote, For if the earth is a camp, led by thousands of spiritual fires, at the hour of darkness, one bivwaks all over the world. I have long held that image in my heart of lights scattered on the hillside signaling to each other in the night of these harrowing times, standing against racism, misogyny, war, and genocide, against the destruction of our biosphere, recognizing that if humanity is to survive, there must be a deep transformation and there is little time left. I would like to send my small fires light to those fires I see, those who marched for black lives to matter in our cities last summer, the water protectors, those who are rekindling indigenous languages, those who recognize the evil of extractive industries and the exploitation of human labor. May all of us see each other and be sustained. They tell me that throughout the history of humanity, all times have been harrowing, maybe yes, but this darkness is ours to fight against. The fires that light it are ours to tend now. In the lateness of the world is a book written over almost two decades, poems in conversation and communion that allowed the shards of my life to refract light and to assemble it into something that resembles a pattern as in a kaleidoscope. They are dedicated to deep friendship and love, to journeys and migrations, difficult memories, and the exemplary souls I have known along the way. They are watery palms of bridges and lighthouses, boats and refugees, the rubble of wars after math. They came to me slowly and persisted in coming, despite all that happened during the years of their making. Thank you for honoring them. I would also like to thank my late parents, Michael Joseph and Louise Neda Sadlowski, my grandmother Anna Baserova, and all those who helped me on my early path to realize the dream of going to college, and who urged me from the age of nine to believe in poetry. I thank the civil rights and anti-war activists who inspired me during my youth, and I thank Leonel Gomez, Magritte Herrera, and all those Salvadorans who educated me later in the world. It is as if I was a small baton passed from one wise person to the next. Thank you to the late Ginger Barber who believed in me from the beginning, and also Bill Clegg, Christopher Richards, and all those at Penguin Press who helped this book to be published on the first day of lockdown 2020. Thank you to my husband Harry Madison and our son, Sean Kristoff Madison, for their decades of love and support. On the cover of my book, there is a crane rising out of the lake, lifting its wings to pull itself into the air. I have always assumed that flight was easy for birds, that it came naturally to them. But what if it isn't? And what if, all along, they have been teaching us how to rise. Thank you and be safe. This is the Great Demon Kings, a memoir of poetry, sex, art, death, and enlightenment by the late John Giorno, passed away in 2019. It's said in Bajriana or Tantric Buddhism that during the dying process known as the bardo, recognizing what is occurring is the key to gaining enlightenment. But I can vouch as the Buddhist that preparing for death is a lifelong practice. Tantric Buddhists engage in something called deity practice, where one visualizes a deity either benign or wrathful in vivid detail, only to dissolve the image in order to better understand the illusory nature of reality and the fantasy we call self, which is only revealed to us upon death unless we are enlightened. The Great Demon Kings reference wrathful gods that meditators invoke to confront self deception with naked laser honesty. Some practitioners go to extremes, such as Giorno did, indulging in sex, drugs, and alcohol to confront their inner demons that they may see their empty nature and detach from them. Giorno's Great Demon Kings, a memoir of poetry, sex, art, death, and enlightenment was 25 years in the making. In its essence, it's a long meditation. The memoir mirrors Giorno's lifelong spiritual journey to self-realization. Every deity in the Buddhist pantheon has a consort and Giorno's remarkable role as consort to the greatest modern artists and influencers of his time Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and William Burroughs provides the reader with intimate bedroom insights into the personalities and psyches, foibles, and sexual fetishes of these Demon Kings, during what Giorno called the golden age of promiscuity when AIDS raged. These wrathful kings shared one thing in common. They were all gay at a time when it was still not acceptable nor marketable to be. Giorno also gives us a valuable account of the New York art scene and its major figures through his uncompromising frank critique of that predatory world and its decadence. Giorno hated piety, pretension, and hypocrisy of any sort, and he fought not only for sexual liberation, but for the liberation of poetry through his dial-up poem recordings, poetry happenings, and his sound poetry, which was found poetry, and its open, raw, homoerotic sexuality in simple language, flouting every rule, rule, and notion of what the poetry establishment deemed poetry. Great Demon Kings exposes the naked truth as lived and read by Giorno in this profound literary feat of a memoir, and before Columbus Foundation is proud to honor the American Book Award posthumously to the great unsung Demon King, John Giorno. Elizabeth D. of the John Giorno Foundation will be accepting his award on video. Thank you so much. My name is Elizabeth D. and I'm the director of the John Giorno Foundation. We could not be more thrilled to be accepting this award from the Before Columbus Foundation. I just want to thank everyone involved with the organization and in recognizing John's greatness with his memoir, Great Demon Kings. I also want to thank the trustees that were involved in this decision and everyone at the organization, also the San Francisco Public Library, Justin Dismangles, and everyone involved. We could not be more grateful. John Giorno is such a force in the history of gay America art history between the beat poets and the pop artists, and also in his work in Tibetan Buddhism. And there's so much dimension to John's contributions historically as a poet and a writer, as someone who performed, and also a wonderful great collaborator with other artists from all generations and all walks of life. And this was very much a part of his purpose driven practice. And that is only evidenced in its complete form in his life's work, which he always called his memoir, his story. And for those of you that may not be aware, this book, Great Demon Kings was 20 years in the making. It was an epic project of proportions that he never rushed, wanted to give time and thoughtful attention to. And it was written with great love and compassion for everyone that was involved in his life. He thankfully completed this 20 year project the month before he suddenly passed on in 2019. And so we are also just deeply grateful and just feel so just overwhelmed with gratitude that we have this book to share with the world and multiple languages and multiple countries and that this is touching people's lives, those and creating an entry point to John's work that maybe wasn't even possible just looking simply at the writing, at the poetry, at the recordings, or at the artwork itself. This brings everything together. And so that's why this word is so very special, this recognition. I know John would have loved to have been here tonight, accepting it and talking to you all personally about that journey. But on behalf of Hugo Ronanone and Laura Hotman, the trustees of the foundation of myself, please know that we are so delighted and just feel like his intentions are continuing to spread throughout the world. I also want to give a very special thanks to Colin Dickerman, who at For Our Strauss and Drew, our publisher, who are also very grateful for giving John this opportunity to write this book and tell this story has been really a consistent collaborator, both during John's lifetime and since John has passed on and has been a great support to all of us and making sure that everybody sees the vision that this book has. And you know, I know that John would have wanted to personally thank him and everybody at the publication. We just could not be more thankful. So in that spirit and John's spirit, I want to say thank you. Hello. I want to, before we get started, I just want to say I've been a board member before Columbus Foundation since it's very beginning and MCed many of these book award ceremonies. And you can imagine, even though we are virtual, what it's like having a group of writers all in the room together. You can imagine the energy and this virtual award show does show us some of that. But you know, hopefully next year, we will again be in person at the library and we can gather these amazing writers all together in person again, because the energy is really astounding. I'm here to introduce an amazing book, Minor Feelings, that during the rise of anti-Asian violence last year, and there was one book that kept pace with the other side of this horrible rise in anti-Asian violence, and it kept getting mentioned over and over again, and that's Kathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings. Minor Feelings is really a mirror into the soul of Asian American identity and sense of self. It's an echo chamber of the things we refuse to say or admit about ourselves even as Asian Americans. And we're lucky to have a poet, accomplished poet lead us the way through this with this book. Kathy Park Hong moves to the front of the line for us to lead so that all of us can pay attention to what she's saying and and throughout the past year, since the book came out, her words have resonated with everybody, particularly Asian Americans. And for those of you who don't read Time Magazine or subscribe to Time Magazine, many of us in the room are not subscribers. I know that for a fact. Time Magazine heard about the fact that we were presenting an award to Kathy Park Hong, so they rushed their issue out to try to undermine the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Awards and beat us to the punch and name Kathy Park Hong one of the influential 100 Americans in the in the nations. I'm a fiction writer, so I'm allowed these moments of fantasy. But if you didn't read Time Magazine, Allie Wong wrote the following about Minor Feelings. She said, I felt so seen that I couldn't believe that this book existed. This is a book to read when you ask me, how can I be an ally? This is a book to read if you want to educate yourself. This is a book to read if you want to be more in touch with your humanity. And so once again, as an accomplished poet, Kathy Park Hong speaks with a kind of weaponized honesty that is so needed at this particular time. And so it's my great pleasure to introduce Kathy Park Hong. Thank you. Thank you to the illustrious board members of the Before Columbus American Book Award. And I have to say thank you especially to Sean Wong, scholar who I admired and who actually edited the OG Asian American Literature anthology that actually first put all of us on the map. You know, an anthology that would have that helped start amplifying Asian American writers. I'm honored to be a recipient among such piercing and progressive thinkers who are committed to changing the American narrative. Minor Feelings itself was edited by an Asian American, the talented Victor Mitsui, designed by an Asian American, a brilliant knock him, published by One World, which is helmed by Chris Jackson and whose editorial staff is all POC. And when it was out, and I was sure that no one was going to read it, you know, because I'm a poet, an experimental poet, and I'm used to when, you know, when a book comes out, it's like the calm before the calm, nothing happens. But when it was out, my most passionate readers and reviewers, advocates were those from the Asian American and POC community who pressed it into the hands of their friends. And of course, I meant that, I mean that figuratively, considering it was COVID times, and no one was pressing anything to anyone's hands. I would also be nowhere without my incredible agent, PJ Mark, publicist, Carrie Neal, Eric, Andrea Pura, and Haley Shear. And thank you to my husband, my daughter, my mother, my father and sister, to be able to receive an award from the esteemed before Columbus Foundation, whose mission is diversity, whose mission was diversity from the beginning. And from the beginning was an intervention to white gatekeepers really makes my heart soar. You know, since last year, I have talked in public at length about the rise in Asian American hate, but here today, I just I would rather just celebrate community, especially since I do have moments of nihilism. And in fact, I was just talking voicing it the other day, I was talking to my friend, and he's fantastic poet, Roger Reeves. And I was telling him about this high school student who said her generation, you know, she was sort of apathetic about the future, because there was no future. And I was sort of thinking the same at that moment, you know, and he reminded me that his ancestors who were enslaved, lived apocalypse, and not already survived, but thrived making art and music and writing. And I think for everyone in this room, like many of our ancestors, those who were indigenous or refugees have lived through end times and have persisted and thrived and created. And I'm just really grateful to all the writers in the room, all the thinkers in the room, who are creating literature that acts as a reparative that pulls the past into the present to find a blueprint for the future. Thank you. Hello. I want to show everyone the book cover. Poems hashtag 289128 by Randall Horton. In poems hashtag 289128, Randall Gavin Horton interrogates his personal journey with an invitation. He queries in the opening poem animals. Is this how the story ends? Horton opens the collection with his dissent into the American prison industrial complex, not unlike Dante's hell. Invited into the narrative, the reader endures a no holds barred visceral dissent. There is no recourse for breath for the audience to look away from the horror through calling out ancestors or other political prisoners such as South African Dennis Brutus. It quickly becomes clear that the true indictment is that of this racist and patriarchal system that allows and encourages the dehumanization of black people in the diaspora. When words or weapons, Horton says, they should be rapid, firing like machine guns into the absurd. He later cries out, where is the Baraka of our generation? By paying homage to other intellectuals incarcerated or condemned for their color-constructed existences, Horton scientifically exposes a lineage of erasure. Some of his titles such as how to become the invisible man and unreliable narrator illuminate the artistry of his poetics. This book, hashtag 289-128 is selected for this American Book Award because not only does Horton present the prison narrative in an explicit and daring voice, his command of poetics and his continuance of a literary conversation pushes forward the art of poetry. Each poem is in a series preceded by a colon indicating that this series, the epic journey in fact, is unified, such as we see in the title itself, embedded in parentheses, jailed, is a number not a title, this number being the number assigned to the speaker, prisoner, Horton, Randall Gavin. The reader is invited once again to follow the narrator, hashtag 289-128, in the last section of the book written mostly on the subway, post-freedom, where sights and sounds and smells continue to evoke the memories of prison, the clanging of the tracks, the opening and closing of doors, the shadows and the darkness, but in his freedom he is suddenly aware of the limited freedom of the female body. This is a surprise of the collection. In his final poems Horton says, I am not post or post-racial or post-human, I am color-constructed and you cannot take it back. This you he addresses is the colonialist, the white supremacist, it is America, it is the prison system. This is an important book because it is so densely packed, poised to raise a discussion that we must have in this country. We collectively choose to let the media and dominant culture define our interpretation of the prison industrial complex. We are silent, passive, and that makes us all guilty. Could one say that Americans who have not visited a prison or been impacted by the prison system are complicit in this new form of slavery? Statistics are not hard to find. In 2014, there were 2.3 million black people in prison and this does not account for the families and children left behind who were impacted. In his final poem After Ruin, Horton evokes imagery of Gene Tumor's cane and a lynching with the haunting words and the after image of the figure is that which will become again and again. Hashtag 289128, a repeated action. The Before Columbus Foundation is honored to present Randall Horton with his American Book Award. Thank you. Thank you. During my time in housing unit three seats here inside cell 23 after lock-in typing edited versions of a failed short story that featured a protagonist as a poet. I didn't know this moment could even be a possibility or that a poet could actually win an award. I didn't know that a protagonist such as myself, one caught up in the melodrama that society inflicts upon the human mind and body. Would I be able to articulate the experiences of those that reside on the inside to give value and meaning to those I left behind in the red yard, the weight pit, the day room. Before I think one single soul I have to pay homage to milkman, Sebastian, black, hell, gnawn and big pun for the little pieces of humanity they gave me while struggling to make sense of a prison sentence at Roxbury Correctional in Hagerstown, Maryland. A place where the circular motion of the second hand on the clock is rate of speed was perhaps more precious than life itself. Each one of these men played a pivotal role in the development of myself as a writer. I gotta say thank you to my silly big pun from Baltimore who read every single thing I wrote late at night in between the moments we were dreaming of freedom. I do not begin to think outside of what society has given me to contemplate, especially as the social structures that create the oppress, if it wasn't for milkman and black, who rolled the ice cart around East sail after found a lock-in for the night. Each time the ice cart stopped in my sail, these two brothers would spend a little extra time to challenge what I knew, to make me think about what I didn't know and why. I gotta say much love to Sebastian for teaching me what it meant to have a moral compass that change is always a verb, that you gotta do change, to be changed. Years later when I was in Chicago State's MFA program in the workshop, I would appreciate the presence of Hale Nall who was quick to let me know if I had alienated my audience. Each Hale Nall offered a critique, offered this critique made me stronger, made me understand to never forget those left behind. Almost 13 years ago the Maryland Department of Corrections assigned me number 289128, which I specifically wanted to grace the cover of the book. I wanted to take back the stereotypical narrative the state tried to attach to me long after the physical lease from prison. I wanted this number to bring attention to the various injustices that are tied to a number, with the skills of justice almost never tips in favor of those outside of the supposedly right-wing community, the ones who never benefited from a supposedly democratic society, the ones who have lived the narrative of exclusion. Anyone who knows me knows that I've never claimed to be a great miscarriage of justice. I don't claim to be the sympathetic face of justice. I didn't go to prison as a juvenile, nor did I get locked up by a mistake or mistaken identity. I spent close to 30 years going against the grain of social structures that raised me because I had become disillusioned with the possibility of the American experiment. It was only through language that I was able to find a path back to the human experiment. A way forward that would allow me to deconstruct the past and look towards a brighter future. Just like you can't take back my blackness in the 21st century with grandiose post-racial society, you can't take back what I saw inside them bricks behind them iron bars. A systemic cycle of a justice that is indeed criminal. Thank you, University of Kentucky Press, for giving 289 when they're at home. Thank you, Patrick O'Dowd, Jackie Wilson, Ashley Ruyan, Jewel Boyd, and Julia Borschens, at capability for drawing up the vision that will put this book in the world. Special thanks to the Ford Columbus Foundation for being that special place that you are. For recognizing diverse voices, to understand the differences we are makes the universality actually seek. Congratulations to all the 21 winners of this special award. In 1998, my father traveled from Birmingham, Alabama to Montgomery County, Maryland to the stand before a circuit court judge and begged for my freedom. This proud, proud man, a man who grew up in Junkrow, South, who at one time worked as a gang that dances back in the 50s land railroad track in Attala, Alabama. A man who became an educator mentoring young men and women who was perhaps perplexed as to why he could not mentor his own son, placed his pride in his back pocket and delivered an oration that left not one dry tear in the courtroom. Because he begged someone to save his son. What other choice did I have but to climb out of the hole I dug for myself? Everything I've done since that day has been for Clarence and Eunice Horton. Thank you, mom and dad. Thank you, Ruby, Mariela Horton, and Alvaro Ramos. I love you, fam. Thank you. Yes, thank you so much, Randall Horton. I wanted to pick up on a thread from Kathy Park-Hong, where she was describing surviving the end times as we bring forward a preeminent historian here in the United States of America who received the American Book Award for the dawning of the apocalypse, Gerald Horn, the roots of slavery, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and capitalism in the long 16th century. Now I say picking up on that thread, because just as there are those today who would wish us to believe that the so-called Middle East was demarcated in 1948, there are people here in the United States of America who would like us to believe that this all started in 1776. But when we start to elongate the arc and panorama of the histories of the Americas, when we start to illuminate that history by including European colonization from its very earliest date, and also its collaborators and compradors here in the United States and elsewhere, and we start to see much more clearly exactly the situation that we find ourselves in today, which is to underline and emphasize that as terrifying as it is, it is also a period in which the missing and mutilated and murdered are always already being asked to forgive, to forgive and forget, as if this were some sort of virtue, as if suffering itself were some kind of redemption. Well, the Before Columbus Foundation isn't going for that. Gerald Horn has never gone for that, and as the historian who I mentioned earlier, Joanna Fernandez, Gerald Horn writes with a rigorous, inventive, and powerfully deciphering quality that also reveals itself in exceptionally clear and startling prose, which for those of you in the Academy know is an exception in academic writing, which is often quite turgid and impenetrable. So again, Gerald Horn, one of our preeminent historians who has penetrated into this history with a forensic depth, and it's a great honor again to welcome Gerald Horn, who is generously joining us by video and winning this year for the dawning of the apocalypse, the roots of slavery, white supremacy, settler colonialism and capitalism in the long 19th century. Gerald Horn. We can't hear you. Unmute. So sorry, let's try that again. Okay, my share of sound has gone. Must be the Federalist Society, or maybe Halleck, could be the Hoover Institute. How about now? I would like to thank the Before Columbus Foundation for honoring not only me, but the intellectual tradition from which I spring for this prestigious honor. The book you have singled out has many facets and purposes, much of which is reflected in the lengthy subtitle. It has a lengthy genealogy I would add modestly, that connects to the elongated black American tradition of critiquing our plight in the face of miasmic creation myths, a tradition that stretches back at least to David Walker's fury appeal of the 1830s to Du Bois' black reconstruction of the 1930s. I would argue that this tradition has accelerated in recent years, not only with the filmmaker Raul Peck and his riveting multi-part documentary series, Exterminate All the Brutes, to the insightful Nicole Hannah-Jones in her 1619 project, to the protein black intellectual Ishmael Reed in the celebrated spoof of the Broadway come Disney extravaganza Hamilton, to the scholar Tyler Stovall in his well-researched and enthralling book, White Freedom, and I would be remiss if I neglected a parallel indigenous tradition embodied in the recent work of Roxanne Dunbar-Artees. All of these creators are seeking to formulate a new narrative, sweeping aside the creation myths that still prevail in this nation, a myth of founding fathers who supposedly walk on water. They were quite special, we are constantly told, utterly unique. However, when we raised the nettle some matter of indigenous genocide and mass enslavement of Africans, like a shifty lawyer, their argument switches to everybody was doing it. In other words, they were quite ordinary and not so special after all. In the book, you have honored indeed in a series of books I've written, including the Apocalypse of Central Colonialism, the Counter-Revolution of 1776, Negro Conference of the Crown, Confronting Black Jackabins on the magnitude of the enormous Haitian Revolution, and the book I am now writing on the Counter-Revolution of 1836 on the roots of Texas and why it is leading the way towards U.S. fascism. In these books and others, I have sought, too, to construct a new narrative like Peck, Hannah Jones, Reed, Stovall, and Dunbar Artis. In short, I argue in the book that you've honored that in the 16th century, a minor monarchy, one of the fringes of Europe, speaking of England, was able to erode the first mover's advantage enjoyed by Catholic Spain, which sponsored Columbus in 1492. And England did this despite the fact that they followed Martin Luther's post-1517 defection from the Catholic Church and embraced the Protestant sect, throwing more gasoline on the fires of already raging religious wars, featuring grand fear of the Muslims, not to mention anti-Jewish fervor. London, which had expelled its own Jewish population in the late 13th century with this back against the wall, embraced the Iberian Jewish population fleeing Spain and Portugal in the wake of the inquisition and then cut a deal with Muslim Turkey against the interests of Catholic Spain. However, this deal worked as suggested by the fact that many of us, including myself, are now sitting on land seized from Spain, which in turn... Buffering happened. We appeared to be circling. That deal now has Beijing in the passing lane. However, Washington's obsession with undermining socialist projects also was revealed in circa 1978 to lure the USSR into a quagmire by 1979. That deal also worked and so far as it contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union by 1991. Time will tell if, like the deal with China, U.S. imperialism thought it was using this Asian giant that actually the reverse was true. And time will tell if the United States thought it was using religious zealots, but in fact, per the musing of Mr. Hakani, now a minister in the government in Kabul, Afghanistan, the United States was actually perhaps laying the groundwork for the construction of a global or even a regional caliphate. In any event, the crowning glory for London comes in 1591 when it allies with Muslim Morocco to stabilize the Sun High Empire in today's Mala, a potent political organ in a war which ricocheted westward and southward, softening up a good deal of Africa as far south as today's Nigeria for the benefit of the aren't rushing African slave trade, which not only built enormous wealth in North America, but also propelled the simultaneous dispossession of not just the indigenous from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but the population of Mexican origin in the southwest and west as well. In other words, over the past 500 years, there was a four-cornered struggle in Europe, Africa, and North and South America, not to mention the Caribbean, that lurks from religion as the axis of society per Spain to, quote, race per England. The latter served to disrupt the former and its revolting spawn, now headquartered in Washington, finish off the Spanish project of religious sectarianism in Florida about 200 years ago, in Texas about 185 years ago, and in Cuba and the Philippines about 120 years ago. The race project in turn was disrupted by the Haitian Revolution 1791 to 1804, which ignited a general crisis of the entire slave system that can only be resolved with its collapse, which it proceeded to do in the spawn of London, speaking of the slave south by 1865. This gives rise to an accelerated class project marked by struggle for the eight-hour day and organizing unions, which gives rise to a socialist project that birthed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which in turn besieges the legacy of slavery by then of the Scottsboro case of the 1930s, which I wrote a slim book about a few years back that put Jim Crow and South African apartheid both on a glide path towards diminution. However, as suggested a few moments ago, the class project has been in retreat of late, and unsurprisingly, we have the recrudescence of the race project as reflected in the title wave of police killings capped by that of George Floyd in May 2020 and horrid life outcomes that continued to beset the population of African descent in North America. This recrudescence is also reflected in the recent articulated view of a major candidate for governor of California who suggested that the reparations for slavery should be considered, i.e. reparations for slave owners whose property was seized post 1865 without compensation. Of course, he and many others in this country are adamantly opposed to reparations to the descendants of the enslaved, and as Hannah Jones has sought to suggest, the terrible life outcomes of slave descendants are directly tied to this peculiar institution of slavery. Likewise, the race and class projects are intertwined, not only because descendants of the informally enslaved are more likely than most to sell their labor for a wage and thus have much to gain for the increase in working class power, but also because of the slaveholding origins of the days United States of America continues to be reflected in a continuing hostility to not only socialism but redistributing the wealth, which are both seen as involving the same expropriation of private property that the devil so many post 1865. This current dispensation will complexify relations enormously with China in the 21st century and may provide propulsion to the seeming inability to help halt religious zealotry. We appear to have a tech issue on this video. I think we made it almost to the very end. Justin. That's all right. So actually it was remarkable fortuitous timing because Gerald Horn ends on religious zealotry, which takes us to our next American Book Award winner Robert Jones, White Too Long, the Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, and I assure you that was not a conspiracy or planned on our part. Robert, not to be confused with Bob Jones, but nicknamed Robbie Jones, begins his book with this quote. I will flatly say that the bulk of this country's white population impresses me and has so impressed me for a very long time as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long. James Baldwin, The New York Times, February 2, 1968. And I hope we were paying attention to Gerald's masterful, basically his history lesson that he just gave us of the past 500 years. And we're seeing the intersection, the sorted marriage of religious and racial chauvinism, some of the ugly birth parents of this country. Whose vision of an American dream has made a nightmare for the rest of us? Now Robbie Jones is the founder of PRRI, Public Religion Research Institute, which is a fantastic research institute at the intersection of politics, culture, and religion that we rely upon to understand the views and opinions of religious communities in America. Now he could have tackled this subject with his keen academic eye, but he goes a step further because Robbie, as you learn in this book, is a product of Southern Baptists. He knows the hymns. He knows Bible and verse. He's gone to the church. He's been trained in it. His parents, his relatives, his loved ones, his elders have given him these American myths and stories, both beautiful and ugly, as he describes in this book, that have led to a situation where a majority of white evangelical Christians in America see their chosen one as Donald Trump, a man who said that his personal Vietnam was avoiding STDs, and they see him as Cyrus, the Persian king, a flawed man nonetheless chosen by God to nonetheless do God's will. And so you see that a white evangelical Christianity that says they fall on the footsteps of Jesus. I went to an all-boys Catholic Jesuit high school where I got the highest grade every semester and did not turn out to be a Jesuit, but I read the Bible. And you sit there and try to reconcile how this Jesus somehow would be against vaccines and against climate change. It would be so cruel towards people of color, towards women, towards immigrants. Would he ever say they come from shithole countries? How does this reconcile with the Bible and the religious teachings of Jesus? And Robbie Jones not only dissects it and explains how we got to this situation, but he does something even more remarkable. Is he dissects and unpacks his own narratives, the myths that he has been told, and takes you on a personal journey where he rejects those myths, and in a quest to heal and to discover a new American, a new Christianity, he sees how he can reconcile it and create a new narrative. It's easier said than done when you are offering yourself and your family and your community up for criticism and public dissection, but that's what Robbie Jones does. He leads us on a journey about how we got here to this country in this particular moment by focusing on the specific, and it's personal, it's painful, it's revelatory. I recommend everyone purchase it. It's called White Too Long, The Legacy of White Supremacy in Christian American Christianity published by Simon Schuster. Robbie Jones, congratulations, take it away. Thanks so much, Wajah. I'm so happy and honored to be here, especially in light of all of the stories, all of the amazing writers here. So thank you so much for this recognition. I'm deeply grateful to receive an American Book Award and to be in such great company of gifted authors working for social and racial justice, both this year and as many have said, across the rich legacy of these awards have created for more than four decades. And I am especially honored because this award is given by writers, to other writers, and work that supports and portrays the full rich diversity of America. Just a couple of personal thank yous. I want to thank my wife and partner Jody Cantor, who is a scholar and fellow writer, her own right intellectual partner, and my son, Jasper Wright, my daughter Riley, who as we all know, writing is a solitary endeavor and who have made space for that in our family's life. To my agent Roger Freed at Folio Literature and to my amazing editor at Simon Schuster, Bob Bender. And finally, to my colleagues at PRRI, Public Religious Research Institute, who are not only experts in collecting all kinds of data, demographic, public opinion and otherwise, but who provide me week after week with such a rich intellectual community. All writers have intellectual and moral debts and I want to take just this short time to acknowledge a large one. And Wajah, it's fortuitous that you read from that opening quote by James Baldwin, because I actually want to just focus my time on saying some words of gratitude about the work in life of James Baldwin, from whose writing the title is taken. It's perhaps surprising that the writing of a black gay author hailing from Harlem, Harlem, a generation before my time would resonate with me, a white straight guy who grew up as a Southern Baptist on the working class side of town in Jackson, Mississippi. But for the first time my eye danced across the lines his head and first hammered out on a manual typewriter. I had an experience as Vest described to kind of grab a word from my religious upbringing as communion. I felt Baldwin speaking to me and what's more, I knew I had a moral responsibility to attempt an answer. His living words pushed me for the first time in my professional career as a social scientist to learn to write in the first person. I was moved by his unflinching perceptiveness. I was in awe that even in his most despairing moments as white Americans and white church goers, repeatedly spurn calls for black equality, he refused to dip his pen into the well of patron. I also found familiar his own deep wrestling with Christianity that both attracted and disappointed him. And I found myself coming back again and again exactly to this quote that you just heard. And I'm going to read it again with just a little bit more context. It's just such a beautiful, amazing piece of writing. Again, and this was written in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I will slightly say that the bulk of this country's white population impresses me. It has so impressed me for a very long time as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it too long. They have been married to the live white supremacy too long. The effect on their personalities, their lives, their grasp of reality has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality which they want me to accept is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself. So I was seven months old when these words first circulated. As I read Baldwin as an adult, I was haunted by his repeated calls to white Americans and particularly white Christians to emerge from our self-induced white supremacist psychosis. One way of reading this book in fact is as a belated attempt to begin to write a white Christian response to Baldwin. One that embraces his hope that with enough courage and love we might yet achieve our country in the racial nightmare and change the history of the world. As Baldwin provocatively noted, the civil rights movement began when an oppressed and despised people began to wake up collectively to what had happened to them. The question today and when Baldwin put before us half a century ago is whether we white Christians will also awaken to see what has happened to us and to grasp once and for all how white supremacy has robbed us of our own heritage and of our ability to be in right relationships with our fellow citizens ourselves and even with God. So thank you James Baldwin. During your lifetime we white Christians were plainly unable to grasp the debilitating contradictions in our own reality even in the incandescent light of your witness. We were unprepared to heed your called truth-telling and repentance and health. We may still prove incapable today but we have a better chance of freeing ourselves from the disfiguring power of white supremacy because of the testimony preserved in your writing. And as we're celebrating writing today this is really is the power the magic really of writing that it can transport experience and ideas across the distances of time and culture that can hold an image in the looking glass until we're able to see it. That it can preserve a seed until there's soil to receive it and bearing fruit sustain us in our time of need. Thank you. Thank you so much Robert Jones. In recent years particularly over the last couple of decades in the San Francisco area we have seen a tremendous influx of people migrating from the five boroughs of New York many of whom have bizarrely attempted to declare the Bay Area not only theirs but a new borough of New York and as we all know there is no truth to this and one can only imagine if some brothers and sisters from Oakland were to land in any one of these boroughs and start popping yang like that. So it is a great medicinal truth-telling mission that Judy Juanita has been on for such a long time and telling it like it is in the tradition of the blues of spirituals of jazz of the great creations of the African American culture and indeed she writes with authority of feeling an undeniable sense of reality and it is even in her title something of a tonic for those of us in the Bay Area Manhattan my ass you're in Oakland so we are very pleased to be able to bring this book the American Book Award and before bringing Judy Juanita to help celebrate and accept the award I'll read just a few words from Ishmael Reed who was hoping to be with us today but unfortunately had a separate obligation. Oakland can't get no respect the towns surrounding it don't want to be associated with it. Judy Juanita even points to sections of Oakland that don't wish to be associated with it. Blacks are profiled in the Rockridge section of Oakland when Juanita calls pretend which Juanita calls pretend Berkeley. Berkeley is the widest city in Contra Costa County regardless of its radical reputation a city where one might be profiled even at cultural institutions both Juanita and I were profiled at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in her book Manhattan my ass you're in Oakland Juanita gives the history of Oakland before the expulsion of blacks from the city by the banks the police and Jerry Brown with the invasion of the city by millennials will Oakland become Berkeley not if Judy Juanita has anything to do about it. Juanita stands up for a city that is more than a place where surrounding cities dump their trash words of Ishmael Reed and again it's a great pleasure to welcome Judy Juanita to the ceremony and honor her Manhattan my ass you're in Oakland with the American Book Award Judy thank you so much for joining us today and being generous with your time oh you're muted there muted Judy we can't hear you unmute good good there you are the first thing I want to say thank you thank you is I want to squirrel myself away and buy all these books and read them because I love all the premises that I've heard so far and thank you for allowing me to be in this company I graciously accept this American Book Award for my poetry collection Manhattan my ass you're in Oakland I'm so honored for my work to be recognized as contributing to diversity in American literature Oakland my Oakland Oakland is the Willy Loman of American cities people keep rediscovering Oakland and when they do they uncover more treasures they get more gold but it seems that it is endless we hope it is my parents Albert H Hart Jr. and Marguerite Juanita Hart migrated here in the 30s and 40s as a child I heard these incredible stories that I thought were tall tales you know each relative getting off the Santa Fe Terminus in Berkeley shepherded here by kindly Black Pullman porters my dad a Tuskegee airman saluting his CEO Benjamin O Davis in Italy each person in my family saving the down payments in mason jars for their homes even though granddad was one of Oklahoma's black oil millionaires many of these poems in the book came out of these stories I heard as a child I was busy having fun enjoying the sunshine the beaches the very good schools the excellent schools in Oakland so I didn't really feel the impact of what my parents felt until I got a little older I in my late teens became a Black activist and some of some people know here that I was a member of the Black Panther Party and for a time I was an editor-in-chief of the Black Panther newspaper but I left here that I left here as a Black activist and a Black Panther I lived in New Jersey what some of us call living in exile when we moved away from the Bay Area and the radical aftermath of the 60s but I returned here in 1990 on the tail end of a major drug war I returned to my parents house which was a stone's throw from the epicenter of the drug wars from Felix Mitchell's drug empire he had even named one of his daughters after my sister Risha I sat there in my parents home writing and listening to the soundtrack of urban warfare sirens gunshots machine gunfire ambulances sometimes I'd sit near Lake Merritt basking in the sunshine and wondering why do I keep seeing the dark side of California why do I see the underbelly of Cali I came home to my aging parents and I finally got it that they had fought the sordid underbelly the whole time they were in sunny California my parents generation which was told after World War II go home go back down south just like Black people once they were finished with us after we had built this country they said go back to Africa but my parents stayed we all stayed most of us stayed so I don't want to take too long but I want to say that even when we're being driven out as we are now by foreign real estate developers we stay even when we move away we stay I worked for a time as a temp at Pac Bell and they had us all come to a big hotel in downtown Oakland with a panoramic view of Oakland's rather plain uh skyline at that time that was 1999 and Mayor Jerry Brown was our speaker and Mayor Brown said we're going to change Oakland we're going to make Oakland real going to be all tall buildings downtown we're not going to touch the flatlands we're going to build up Oakland so over the next 20 years I actually saw that happen you know and I also saw many friends move friends and relatives move to Atlanta Modesto, Merced, Sacramento they moved away but we've all purchased and paid for dearly our destiny here in Oakland so I want to thank the before Columbus Foundation and particularly the guy we call uncle ish okay Ishmael Reed for believing in Oakland for saluting our humanity our poetry our sonnets our street sonnets and I also have to thank of course I thank my parents I think I've done that in my family members but I want to thank two people because I want other people perhaps younger writers to understand how it's done sometimes I want to thank two landlords one Mr. Petzales in Ridgewood, New Jersey where I lived very cheaply for nine years in a very posh suburb called Ridgewood, New Jersey and I was able to educate my son there and also my landlord here who a realtor friend told me is one of Oakland's better landlords and Lance and I've lived in this apartment for 21 years through eight books and 20 plays it's only been possible by paying a very low rent here so I am having rent control so there are many factors that go into those of us who are writing from the bottom and I thank everyone that I've encountered and who has helped me thank you so much thank you so much Judy Juanita we are absolutely elated this afternoon to have the presence of the artist I.T. Kelly the wife of the late author William Melvin Kelly who is being honored with the American Book Award for his novel Dunford's Travels Everywhere. Now for those of you who may not be familiar with William Melvin Kelly and I.T. Kelly you're in for some great big beautiful surprises William Melvin Kelly to be sure one of the most innovative and exciting authors in the history of our language and I'll go ahead and read directly from the citation which appears at beforecolumbus.com the opportunity to honor William Melvin Kelly with the American Book Award is indeed a great privilege before Columbus Foundation is elated to welcome his work back into print thanks to Anchor Books and it is a unique thrill to see Dunford's Travels Everywhere now illustrated in its new edition by I.T. Kelly who joins us this afternoon when we also honor with this year's award the majesty of William Melvin Kelly's vital contribution to international letters remains urgent and cosmic in scope it is a unifying embrace the panorama of human experience embodied in the mythologies that we all share here in the Americas and throughout the world is unique in his work it's propulsive momentum it's extraordinary sensuality it's syncopation and invention of imagination is unparalleled really and as Marcel Duchamp had said many decades ago the history of art is often the history of belated dates and so I hope that all of you will join me not only in honoring William Melvin Kelly but in understanding that many of the greatest writers are to be returned to to be cherished to be honored as we are honoring William Melvin Kelly today and again it's a great great pleasure to welcome I.T. Kelly here to accept the American Book Award for Dunford's Travels Everywhere again which she illustrated and again thank you I.T. for being with us and being generous with your time and honoring the great William Melvin Kelly as well okay thank you so much Justin that was that was just amazing thank you and I would like to sincerely and deeply thank before Columbus Foundation for existing and for the American Book Award I want to thank Ishmael Reed especially Ishmael whose support of Kelly's work has meant more than words can say thank you Ishmael this award is a profoundly meaningful recognition of Dunford's Travels Everywhere Kelly's work of eccentric sardonic ironic genius inspired by James Joyce's quote my soul frets in the shadow of his language Willie invented his own language in Dunford's Travels Everywhere and I could make it visual we work together like Billy Holiday and Lester Young improvising and riffing and swinging Dunford's moves like jazz always improvising on themes on the spoken word rhythms of our people and on what you see and on what you think you see I recognize Willie's genius when we met in April 1962 at the Penn Relay weekend we got married that December we shared one soul sometimes warm and soft and comfortable as old moccasins and sometimes contentious crackling with thunder and lightning we were living in Jamaica in a sweet house with an outside room that Willie commandeered as his office in this room away from the cacophony of family life he could enter the portal of the soul world and create the language of Dunford's Travels Everywhere in the evening sitting at our small kitchen table he'd read me what he'd written and I would draw it the world came alive twisting and leaping full of double and triple quadruple entendres we would laugh out loud me he did not just go there him yep baby you got what I saw he especially liked my vision of his women that I thought the essence of his love for them for us for all of us his afro malma me alma my soul it has taken a long time to unite this written and visual art 52 years to be exact we had to wait with excruciating patience for technology to be able to scan the drawings to send them on the internet for one daughter to grow up and become a graphic designer and here it is now the way we saw it the way we wanted it to exist I know Willie is well pleased by this award looking down from heaven we're climbing on the cloud of pure ganja I want to acknowledge our team at this point our team at William Morris endeavor particularly Tracy Fisher for getting this book republished with the illustrations the way we've wanted it to be with the covers that we wanted and the publisher of Pentagon Random House Lou Ann Walther from the depths of our shared soul Willie and I want to say again with gratitude and humility thank you thank you beautiful thank you I'm very much aware of time and I'll be very brief briefly that I'm comfortable with being it's an honor to introduce my distinguished colleague and friend Dr. Mary Emma Graham for this occasion which is a very special one for both of us but for all of America Dr. Graham has an extraordinary vision of what needs to be explored what needs to be said as founder of the project on the history of black writing Dr. Graham has consistently demonstrated her skills as a gifted scholar a literary and cultural critic an extraordinary teacher an attitude and she's done this by setting new directions for the study of african-american creativity and productivity which also casts a light on what productivity and creativity are she's esteemed esteemed throughout our profession such as it is it is changing ever changing for for her leadership abilities which I think is really very important when we think of women leaders we don't think enough about how women have led us oh yeah like Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander uh one of her four mothers Dr. Graham is uh has recently completed an interluxual biography of Dr. Alexander and I'm going to take the risk of saying my friend Dr. Mary Emma Graham is a national treasure therefore it is just that she is being recognized for her stellar vision and her indisputable accomplishments thank you Jerry thank you thank you Jerry my partner in crime this is a very humbling experience uh the american book award for lifetime achievement and it's I'm honored in multiple ways because it not only brings public attention to the kind of work that often goes unnoticed but it also fully acknowledges the value of our engagement and when I say our I mean the project on the history of black writing with hundreds of scholars and researchers educators and students readers and writers who are part of our hbw community and I really talk about that in worldwide terms you know who you are and I am grateful that you never questioned why we were doing this work which is in all honesty some of the most labor intensive unattractive work in the field although hbw is gaining more recognition today many of us know the backstory founded in 1983 hbw remains perhaps one of the few and I hesitate to say only institutionally based initiatives that exist entirely through external funding and because of the support from all of you it also makes more visible an authentic collaborative work ethic that can indeed be transformative today black writing and black artist hip are central to american and world culture recognition within the prestigious reward systems is increasingly routine just as black writers can look forward to fellowships and monetary incentives to support their work but at hbw we don't stop literary recovery and preservation making accessible what emerges from the literary detective work which is what we call what we're doing and producing new knowledge that belongs to everyone matters more than ever three principles that guide and sustain the work really say it all we're student driven research intensive and public facing this was a somewhat revolutionary idea at the time of our founding as form and shape came from people's college a model of collaborative rather than individual work as an intellectual and professional priority given that critical theory dominated literary studies at that time advocating exclusion in its language and practice our approach at hbw was decidedly collective and inclusive we've gone through many iterations as a result of the amazing networks and partnerships that such inclusive practices have allowed a respect for difference and the commitment to innovation keeps us current and ever involving let me share a few liner notes this year marks the 275th anniversary of lucy terry's poem bars fight which she shared in public in 1746 i call it the predecessor to spoken word in two years we will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the first published work by a black writer in america none other than phyllis wheatley's 1773 collection poems on various subjects we also now know that our nigg by harry wilson was the first narrative work or a graphical novel published in 1859 i am not the first to make the observation that the more work we uncover the more we realize the foundational role of black women writers and black women's writing market walker made such an observation in 1773 with the phyllis wheatley festival which marked the 200th anniversary of wheatley's publication and she did so at jackson state university as jerry said walker is indeed a fourth mother for me for my attendance at that event in 1770 in 1973 when i was a beginning graduate student would have had a lasting impact if walker became the 20th century voice of the south we know the 19th century voice of the south from the title of anna julia cooper's 1892 collection one of the most educated women of her time she offered a declaration that would become a mantra only the black woman she said can say when and where i enter in the quiet undisputed dignity of my womanhood without violence and without suing or special privilege then and there the whole negro race enters with me i did not see this as a political statement at the time nor a feminist one it affirmed the reality for someone like me who had been raised by three generations of black women in the south my mother my godmother and a great aunt who was suffering from a terminal disease but insisted on teaching me how to read before i could go would go to school hbw was born in the south at old miss and i seldom acted with the kind of quiet dignity that cooper talks about and like many writers we study the project has migrated and eventually settled at the university of cancels with the support of the vanshastre brocket hymnway our success in these 22 years is not ours alone as our reputation has spread many of you sent us your students who have helped us to become what we are today others of you found your way independently to us seeing and with with neh institutes or with our programs still others found hbw an alternative space where you could come into your own with support and guidance without falling victim to an often elitist academy that forced you into a particular mold to the members of the before columbus foundation i thank you for this award for doing what i love not many of us get to do that and certainly not for a lifetime i especially want to thank my family who have not necessarily willingly had to play second fiddle to this work a huge debt of gratitude goes to the national endowment for the humanities our long time partner without whom we would not have survived i'll remind you that public engagement by universities is too often lip service rarely a form of sustained support the black literary tradition remains incomplete and we will at hbw continue our work to recover it to the fullest extent possible today we have recovered some 4 000 mostly unknown writers soon you your students and the general public will have access to all that we have and more for the nearly four decades of our work thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon foundation hbw will create its most innovative digital resource to date black literature net or bl net is a multimedia information portal offering everyone an opportunity to learn and to engage what is often only available to a precious few scholars for me this is a wonderful opportunity to step back and allow for the new to unfold black literature net will bring familiar and new faces to hbw this will be also be the beginning of hbw's new leadership we welcome aisha hardison as hbw's new director will be working with our ongoing coordinator sarah arbeth not let both of whom deserve my sincere thanks for already having jump started hbw the next generation like judy wanita i'm planning on reading all the books that i have heard about today some of which i've already ordered a perfect way to begin retirement thank you again for this rare opportunity for the project on history of black writing to intersect with writers of such power and reminding us why it is so important to continue to to continue our work of preserving and protecting all forms of written literacy and the traditions through which we come to life and find meaning in language thank you thank you so much professor mary emma graham winner of the lifetime achievement award throughout the many joys and pains satisfactions refusals triumphs and failures of the republic one of the greatest failures of the united states of america to be sure has been his failure to embrace black leadership from frederick douglas w e b de bois to more recently martin luther king all of whom were at one time eager to represent the ideals and promise of the nation to reveal its horizons of freedoms of potential freedoms to the rest of the world and to embrace that humanity as part of its vision that list of course contains many names and it would not be complete without mentioning that of paul robison paul robison who as we now discover through this extraordinary work by shana redmond everything man the form and function of paul robison created and forged black internationalism and identity at its highest level as an organizer as a performing artist and as a unique facilitator of new technologies for spreading the message not only of potential freedom and survival and political revolution but also his deep and abiding love for his people and the people of our planet earth it is a great honor to welcome shana redmond to the ceremonies this afternoon and i want to thank personally for this beautiful work that you have bestowed upon our world much needed and deeply satisfying thank you so much shana for bringing this work to our world thank you so much there are many tales of this man's influence volumes upon volumes personal and public in languages from all over the world he is too capacious for one nation one form one time or purpose yet many including myself humbly approach in hopes that our rigorous dedicated pieces will begin to bring him into focus poets in particular abound the shining nicky giovanni revealed him in the lion in daniel's den for paul robison senior in which she wrote on the road to demascus to slay the christians saul saw the light and was blinded by that light and looked into the darkness and embraced that darkness and saul arose from the great white way saying i am paul who would slay you but i saw the darkness and i am that darkness then he raised his voice singing red black and green songs saying i am the lion in daniel's den i am the lion thrown to slaughter do not fear the lion for he is us and we are all in daniel's den the songs that arise from these still too present still too populist dens and cages are the foundations for the futures we build paul robison is its canter and bricklayer griot and holler and it has been the honor of my career to be in his study wise people understand the significance of this award that honors and amplifies radical storytelling and the communities who populate and dream these stories i am honored to be in this number from these unceded lanope lands i offer my profound thanks to my beautiful talented loved ones and co-conspirators including my brilliant partner shara hayley our little robison and professor mahmood al khati who was the first person to speak the name paul robison in my ear thank you to the multiply cited founders of the before columbus foundation its distinguished board the ever-dedicated and thoughtful chairman of the board justin de ma the lo and fells for whom this award is named and who lived courageous lives in subversive writing my editor at duke ken whistaker who never questioned what or why and to my fellow awardees and those before who inspire and challenge me to think and write better and more i raise a glass and offer my deep appreciation to you all and thanks eternally to the thinkers artists abolitionists and movement people who make our stories possible and resonance not least of them the everything man paul robison thank you so much shawna one of the most terrifying brutal and violent episodes in the history of the americas is taking place right now with the thousands tens of thousands tens of thousands of children who have been separated from their families including many who came desperately into the united states of america by themselves there are tens of thousands of these children which remain in concentration camps run by the united states of america and its chain of private prisons along our southern border and penetrating into the united states this fact of our daily life as we understand through the work of gerald horn whom we honored earlier is in fact many many centuries old very few very few in the united states government continue to apply any sort of attention to this issue indeed many have continued to obfuscate it and the late elijah comings was one of the very few in the congress who stood up to make it very clear that this should be something that is an urgent part of our public political life to bring an end to this abuse and this violence and this terror fewer still among the mainstream of corporate news media have paid any real abiding attention to this issue and one of the very very few is the winner of our anti censorship award this year his name is jacob soberoff and he wrote the book separated inside an american tragedy again the anti censorship award going to jacob soberoff for his noble and powerful work separated inside an american tragedy hey everybody i am very deeply grateful to everybody at the before columbus foundation and the american book award for this incredible honor as i write in the introduction to the book i was an unlikely eyewitness to one of the most shameful chapters in modern american history the deliberate and forced separation of over 5500 children from their parents at the border by the trump administration was deemed tortured by physicians for human rights it was called government sanctioned child abuse by the american academy of pediatrics and the truth is i didn't see it coming there were others who did there were reporters who did activists who did certainly migrants for whom this type of treatment at the hands of the united states was not at all unfamiliar but as a reporter for nbc news covering what i thought were the realities of life along the border debates about the wall about ms-13 where drugs were coming in i ended up in the middle of what a government official later said to me was the greatest human rights catastrophe of my lifetime and all i could do whether it was in that 250 000 square foot former wal-mart or the epicenter of the separation policy in mcallin texas they called it ursula was to walk outside after seeing what i saw and hold up a mirror at the paraphrase of walter crown cut and that's why in particular being recognized with this anti-censorship award is very meaningful to me there was no original video allowed in that facility by any of the media to show the realities of life for separated kids there were no still photographs there were there was just us and there were there were 10 or more of us at each of those locations walking up to show that the gas lighting by the trump administration was not to be believed today this story isn't over there are still hundreds of families who are separated they're still enduring the trauma that will stick with them for a lifetime and the biden administration has promised to reunite every last one when he was running for president joe biden called this policy criminal he said there would be a thorough thorough investigation but it still has not happened yet the families have not yet been able to be granted the ability to stay in this country permanently yet um that is why i continued to share this story to share what i saw to share what i learned after the fact to be truthful about what i knew and what i didn't and i'm going to continue doing that this award and your great honor is a huge validation of that effort and it means a lot to me so thank you and i appreciate it congratulations to all the other awardees thank you very much again that brings us to the conclusion of the 42nd annual american book awards uh i would uh echo the earlier message from our president of hua haja ali please do find us on the internet at before columbusfoundation.com and give generously to the foundation and the american book awards we do not have the myriad corporate sponsors of many of the other major literary awards here in the united states nor do we have uh any grant support from educational institutions our support comes directly from writers and readers such as yourself so please again all of you i urge you to visit us online at before columbusfoundation.com where you can find this recording and many others of our efforts and give generously to the before columbus foundation and thank you again to the san francisco public library and thank you to all of the winners congratulations once again. Justin award winners we thank you very much have a wonderful i know that there's clapping and cheering going on we can't see it we can't hear it but i hope you all can feel it these books are all available at our library and yes let's hunker down and i'll read together yes okay thank you we'll see you all live next year in san francisco yes absolutely carry on thank you take care everyone enjoy it