W. Paul Coates is the founder of Black Classic Press and BCP Digital Printing. Black Classic Press, established in 1978, specializes in republishing obscure and significant works by and about people of African descent. BCP Digital Printing was founded in 1995 as a parallel entity of the Press, producing books and documents on demand, and placing Black Classic Press on the forefront of 21st-century print and publishing technology.
As a former African American Studies Manuscript and Reference Librarian at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Mr. Coates was responsible for the collection and acquisition of African American books and related materials, including the selection and purchase of rare and non-rare items. A former member of the Black Panther Party, he led the effort to establish the Black Panther Archives at Howard.
Mr. Coates is a graduate of Clark Atlanta University’s School of Library and Information Studies and Sojourner-Douglass College (SDC), from which he received an honorary PhD in 2015. He is an active Black bibliophile and collector of cultural artifacts and maintains an extensive collection of Global African Cookbooks. Mr. Coates is co-editor of Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Preservers of Black History. He was a founding member and chair of the National Association of Black Book Publishers. In addition, he served as an adjunct instructor of African American Studies at SDC. He formerly owned and operated The Black Book from 1972–1978, a Baltimore-based bookstore. His experience with the purchase, sale, and collection of books by and about Blacks is a love affair that has continued over six decades.
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With the presentation of the 2 prestigious awards for "Life Time Achievment" completed, the evening quickly turned to the 5 book category award winners listed below!
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In The Category Of Fiction
The Winner:
Percival Everett
Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His most recent books include Dr. No, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Award; The Trees, finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; Telephone, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; So Much Blue; Erasure; and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and the Windham Campbell Prize. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna.
The Book:
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his death to escape his violent father and recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.
Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.
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In The Category Of Non-Fiction
The Winner:
Jason De León
Jason De León is professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies and Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a 501(c)(3) research, arts, and education collective that seeks to raise awareness about migration issues globally while also assisting families of missing migrants reunite with their loved ones. He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and author of the award–winning book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail.
The Book:
Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
An intense, intimate, and first-of-its-kind look at the world of human smuggling in Latin America, by a MacArthur "genius" grant winner and anthropologist with unprecedented access
Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders.
As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year.
Yet the real lives and work of smugglers—or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services—are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords, in an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion-dollar global industry, internationally recognized anthropologist and expert Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years.
The result of this unique and extraordinary access is SOLDIERS AND KINGS: the first ever in-depth, character-driven look at human smuggling.
It is a heart-wrenching and intimate narrative that revolves around the life and death of one coyote who falls in love and tries to leave smuggling behind. In a powerful, original voice, De León expertly chronicles the lives of low-level foot soldiers breaking into the smuggling game and morally conflicted gang leaders who oversee rag-tag crews of guides and informants along the migrant trail.
SOLDIERS AND KINGS is not only a ground-breaking up-close glimpse of a difficult-to-access world, but it is also a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.
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The Winner:
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of Water & Salt which won the 2018 Washington State Book Award; Kaan & Her Sisters, a finalist for the Firecracker Award; and Something About Living, winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. Her writing has been published in journals including the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Poets.org, Protean Magazine, and Prairie Schooner, and in anthologies including The Long Devotion and We Call to the Eye & the Night. She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series Poems from Palestine at The Baffler. She is currently curating a series on Palestinian writers for Words Without Borders entitled Against Silence.
The Book:
It’s nearly impossible to write poetry that holds the human desire for joy and the insistent agitations of protest at the same time, but Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s gorgeous and wide-ranging new collection Something About Living does just that.
Her poems interweave Palestine’s historic suffering, the challenges of living in this world full of violence and ill will, and the gentle delights we embrace to survive that violence.
Khalaf Tuffaha’s elegant poems sing the fractured songs of the Diaspora while remaining clear-eyed about the cause of the fracturing: the multinational hubris of colonialism and greed.
This collection is her witness to our collective unraveling, vowel by vowel, syllable by syllable. “Let the plural be a return of us” the speaker of “On the Thirtieth Friday We Consider Plurals” says and this plurality is our tenuous humanity and the deep need to hang on to kindness in our communities.
In these poems Khalaf Tuffaha reminds us that love isn’t an idea; it is a radical act.
Especially for those who, like this poet, travel through the world vigilantly, but steadfastly remain heart first. ―Adrian Matejka, author of Somebody Else Sold the World
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In The Category Of Translated Literature
The Winner:
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ Lin King
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ is a writer of fiction, essays, manga and video game scripts, and literary criticism. Her works have been translated into Japanese and French.
Lin King is a writer and translator from Taipei, Taiwan. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Boston Review, and Joyland, among others, and has received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Translations from Mandarin and Japanese into English include Yang Shuang-Zi’s novel Taiwan Travelogue and the historical graphic novel series The Boy from Clearwater by Yu Pei-Yun, illustrated by Zhou Jian-Xin. Lin holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Columbia University, where she has taught undergraduate writing.
A bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history, and power.
May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda.
Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.
Soon a Taiwanese woman―who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name―is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter, and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer.
But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is.
Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.
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In The Category Of Young People's Literature
The Winner:
Shifa Saltagi Safadi
This heartfelt coming-of-age novel in verse tells the powerful story of a seventh-grade Syrian American boy and his struggles, big and small, as he navigates middle school.
Seventh grade begins, and Kareem’s already fumbled it.
His best friend moved away, he messed up his tryout for the football team, and because of his heritage, he was voluntold to show the new kid—a Syrian refugee with a thick and embarrassing accent—around the school.
Just when Kareem thinks his middle school life has imploded, the hotshot QB promises to get Kareem another tryout for the squad. There’s a catch: to secure that chance, Kareem must do something he knows is wrong.
Then, like a surprise blitz, Kareem’s mom returns to Syria to help her family but can’t make it back home. If Kareem could throw a penalty flag on the fouls of his school and home life, it would be for unnecessary roughness.
Kareem is stuck between. Between countries. Between friends, between football, between parents—and between right and wrong.
It’s up to him to step up, find his confidence, and navigate the beauty and hope found somewhere in the middle.
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In Conclusion:
During their acceptance speeches, many of the authors spoke about their commitment to resisting AI encroachment, supporting literature as a form of resistance and source of hope and standing together as a community.
Kate McKinnon: "I wanted to be here because books do so many things. They inspire, they transport, they kill spiders when you can't find a shoe," McKinnon said in her opening address, after joking that she didn't have the "necessary gravitas" to host the event.
"Ultimately we tell stories because we want help. A book is an offering. It's a hand in the darkness. A way of saying, 'I know. Isn't this crazy?' And that's something that a robot will never be able to do," McKinnon continued. "Robots do not know what it is like to be certain you're going to die one day. Robots do not experience racism or food insecurity. Robots do not lose their partners, weep over election results or receive a devastating diagnosis."
As Always, Thanks For Reading
Rick