Hurston/Wright Winners, Finalists Announced

The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation has announced its 2024 Merit Award honorees and finalists for the Legacy Awards for Black writers in the categories of fiction, debut fiction, speculative fiction, historical nonfiction, memoir nonfiction, and poetry. The winners of the Legacy Awards will be announced at a gala event on October 18 in Washington, D.C.

The 2024 Merit Award winners are:

• N.K. Jemisin, winner of the North Star Award for outstanding literary achievement
• Claudia Rankine, winner of the Ella Baker Award for exceptional work that advances social justice
• Marcus Books, winner of the Madam C.J. Walker Award for exceptional innovation in supporting and sustaining Black writers and literature

The 2024 Legacy Awards finalists are: 

Debut Fiction   

• Elizabeth Acevedo (Family Lore; Ecco) 
• Soraya Palmer (The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts; Catapult) 
• Kai Thomas (In the Upper Country; Viking Books) 

General Fiction   

• Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Chain-Gang All-Stars; Pantheon Books) 
• Cheryl A. Head (Time's Undoing; Dutton) 
• Ayana Mathis (The Unsettled; Alfred A Knopf) 
• Mihret Sibhat (The History of a Difficult Child; Viking Books) 

  Speculative Fiction   

• Johnny Compton (Spite House; Tor Nightfire) 
• Mary McLaughlin Slechta (Mulberry Street Stories; Four Way Books) 
• Moses Ose Utomi (Lies of Ajungo; Tordotcom) 

Historical Nonfiction   

• Victor Luckerson (Built From the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street; Random House) 
• Donovan X. Ramsey (When Crack Was King; One World) 
• Yepoka Yeebo (Anansi's Gold: The Man Who Looted the West, Outfoxed Washington, and Swindled the World; Bloomsbury Publishing) 

Memoir Nonfiction   

• Dionne Ford (Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing; Bold Type Books) 
• Emmanuel Iduma (I Am Still With You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance, and History; Algonquin Books) 
• Cassandra Jackson (The Wreck: A Daughter’s Memoir of Becoming a Mother; Viking Books) 
• Leta McCollough Seletzky (The Kneeling Man: My Father’s Life as a Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; Counterpoint) 
• Aomawa Shields (Life on Other Planets; Viking Books) 

Poetry    

• Amanda Gunn (Things I Didn't Do With This Body; Copper Canyon Press) 
• Patricia Spears Jones (The Beloved Community; Copper Canyon Press) 
• A. Van Jordan (When I Waked, I Cried To Dream Again; W.W. Norton & Co.) 
• Airea Dee Matthews (Bread & Circus; Scribner) 
• Charif Shanahan (Trace Evidence; Tin House)