- [Announcer] Funding of the Ideastream Public Media production of the 86th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards was provided by the The Cleveland Foundation.

(seagulls squawking) (soft music) - When you think of Cleveland, Ohio, what comes to mind to mind?

(waves lapping) To me, freedom and expression come to mind.

Cleveland was a major destination for escaping slaves as they made their way to freedom across the Ohio river.

Cleveland is the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which celebrates the music that has its roots in the blues.

And Cleveland was the home of visionary philanthropist and poet, Edith Anisfield Wolf.

Devoted to social justice, Edith believed that the most critical issue plaguing the United States was racism, and that literature was uniquely able to tackle this entrenched problem in our society.

And so began the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

86 years later, it remains the only American Book Award designed specifically to recognize works of literary excellence addressing issues of race and cultural diversity.

Its mission is more crucial than ever, and it's still based in Edith's hometown in Cleveland, Ohio.

(soft music continues) (audience applauding) (piano playing) - I won the Annisfield Wolf Book Award in 2017 for my book of poetry entitled "Olio."

What's up Cleveland?!

For me, it was just an overwhelming sense of gratitude that I could be in this place and take part in this honor.

It's a real honor here to be here tonight, to be in the presence of a tradition that seeks to treasure that funneling of spirit onto the page.

Anisfield Wolf is a bellwether for excellent literature that inspires millions.

(audience applauding) - Prizes suck when they're there to create hierarchies, but they're incredibly useful for bringing people to reading.

We all need help.

And this is the prize that certainly gets it more right than other prizes that I have been involved in.

If you look at the winners, and you look at all the winners, and then you look at the winners from another prize, I think you would say, "Mmm, wow, man, Anisfield Wolf is a batting clue in nearly a thousand.

(audience applauding) (soft music) - I won in 2015 for "Hard Love Province," and it is for the category of poetry.

And it was in the inaugural year for poetry, so I was so thrilled and honored.

I have tears in my eyes.

I was so excited when I won the award.

It gave me courage to go on.

It really solidified everything I wanted to do in life that is to write poetry, to write, to be an activist poet, to have my voice be heard.

(audience applauding) So as promised, I'm gonna read these bad girl haiku for Skip.

And I teased Professor Gates a little bit with my bad girl haiku.

"I plucked out three white pubic hairs, and they turned into flying monkeys."

(audience laughing) I don't know, that was spur of the moment.

(Marilyn laughing) (audience clapping) - And it's not just about the content of the material, it's the effect; the purported effect it might have in the country as a whole.

And when you're a writer, that's what you want.

You wanna know that your work is going to have an impact.

And when somebody tells you that they think it's important enough that they're gonna give you an award for it, that's when you realize you've really... You've hit a home run for me, and that's what it was.

(audience applauding) - I'm Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and I have the enormous pleasure and privilege of chairing the jury of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

I'm also a former honoree, along with the individuals you just saw in the previous segment, including literary titans like Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison.

It's one of the greatest honors of my life to be in their company.

This year, four new brilliant writers entered the fold, Victoria Chang for "Obit," a truly haunting book of poems.

- I was writing sort of the things that maybe I needed to read.

I was making what wasn't there for me.

- [Henry] Natasha Trethewey from "Memorial Drive," a memoir at once, clear-eyed and heartrending.

- I needed to be the one to write about her, to tell the story of her tremendous strength and courage.

- [Henry] Vincent Brown for "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War," a rewriting from the ground up of an episode in the Atlantic slave trade.

- One of the things that I'm trying to do here is write about the history of the enslaved more than the history of slavery as an institution.

- [Henry] Samuel R. Delaney, the legendary novelist and cultural critic is our lifetime achievement honoree for his robust, fearless, and genre spanning body of work, which includes science fiction novels, memoirs, and essays.

- I write the kinds of books that I wish I could find to read.

And if I'm lucky enough, they survive and actually get into print.

- [Henry] And for a second time, we honored James McBride for his hauntingly vibrant work of fiction, "Deacon King Kong."

- In writing, when there's judgment, there's no journey.

And writing is all about... Well, good writing is all about the journey.

- In "Obit," poet Victoria Chang prefers the stark objective language of the newspaper obituary to that of the elegy, a form that overflows with sorrowful and often florid language.

The immediate spark for these poems was her mother's death in 2015, but Chang's obituaries memorialized not just people, but also lost things.

Appetite, language, control printed in narrow columns as if clipped from a newspaper.

These pieces are interspersed with shorter pieces, giving multiple forms to a single voice as expression of loss.

For giving strikingly original language to the universal experience of grief in a year in which too many lives have been lost, Victoria Chang is the recipient of this year's Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for poetry.

(energetic music) - "The Head-died on August 3rd, 2015.

When the two men finally came, they rolled a gurney into the other room, hushed talking and noises, then the tip of the gurney came out like a cruise ship.

They were worried about dinging the walls.

My mother's whole body covered with a blanket.

Her head gone.

Her face gone.

Rike was wrong.

The body is nothing without the head.

My mother, now covered was no longer my mother.

A covered apple is no longer an apple.

A sketch of a person isn't the person.

Somewhere in the morning, my mother had become the sketch.

And I would spend the rest of my life trying to shade her back in."

(waves lapping) (seagulls squawking) Being out here, it feels comfortable.

(soft music) Just the way that people talk to each other, the way you can go around places, and no one would think twice about what you look like.

And there's just so many different kinds of people.

It's not to say it's perfect at all, but it feels comfortable to me, yeah.

I was born and raised in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan.

Growing up there was hard.

So much of my upbringing was about assimilation as an Asian American woman and child, and we were mostly invisible.

And when we were visible was when that was trouble, was like you were having rocks thrown at you.

(chuckles) Or how many times in my life people have pulled their eyes wide?

It's endless the numbers of times that when we were visible, it was abusive.

So this one says, (speaks in foreign language) So it says, "The one in the frontest front is mother."

As I've gotten older and live in California now, it's like, "I don't wanna assimilate."

I want nothing to do with assimilation.

I'm not interested at all.

I don't even wanna hear that word; in my brain, that sort of talk that I used to give myself.

But this one's a really cool one.

This is my grandmother.

I guess she had climbed up this mountain in Taiwan.

She was like 40 or something.

And that was really unusual because the mountain was really hard to climb up.

She was very active, so she liked to go hiking and mountain climbing.

I just wanna do what I think is right and what I want to do.

And I have a good intuition and that comes from my family, my upbringing, my culture.

And so it's very freeing.

But I never really saw these photos until my mother died.

and then I found a ton of boxes, and I started digging through all of these boxes.

My mother looks really happy there.

(chuckles) I've never seen her smile like that before.

Once my mother died, I just remember just writing things and crying at the same time.

So it was very emotional, and I never really thought I was writing it for anyone else, but I do remember thinking, "Could I explain the feelings to someone, some imaginary person that I'm sitting across from?"

But I wasn't thinking that I was ever gonna publish these.

I didn't even think they were poems.

I think I would describe "Obit" as a distillation of grief.

I did not wanna write traditional elegies because everyone else had done it.

All these elegies are written by all these usually white men in the past.

Being an Asian-American woman with immigrant parents from Taiwan and China, my experiences just didn't feel like those poems.

- [Radio Broadcaster] MPR comes from MPR stations.

- I remember sitting in a car listening to MPR, and they were talking about the documentary film called "Obit."

- [Radio Broadcaster] "Obit," it follows the staff writers of the New York times obituary."

- And that word, obit, triggered something in my brain.

And I just started writing.

Something about the obituary form gave me that freedom to write about my particular feelings about grief.

The first one I wrote was "The Bees-died in Nome, Alaska" or something like that.

And then I just wrote another one and then another one and another one.

Then I started fiddling with the form and shaping it like an actual obituary, like thin and narrow.

At some point, I started reading real obituaries, just seeing the structure and the format.

And then I kept on writing.

Once the obituary format sort of appeared in my brain, it gave me that freedom to just write about all the losses.

Because when my mother was sick, little things died every day.

I was writing sort of the things that maybe I needed to read, if that makes sense.

And so I was making what wasn't there for me.

Writers have ideas.

We have things that we wanna say, preconceived notions.

And sometimes, you might know what you wanna write before you even sit down to write.

Come on Mustard, slow down.

Mustard's always racing to get back home.

That is like the biggest nightmare for me as a poet.

I do not wanna know at all what I'm thinking or feeling.

I just wanna be taken along in the process.

You don't wanna be the person that's walking the dog.

You want the dog to walk you.

And I actually have dogs that walk me.

They're wiener dogs, and they're very strong personalities, and I'm a total pushover.

So when I take them for a walks, they tell me where they wanna go.

But that's how I think about it.

I think about it as you wanting the language to take you for a walk, but we don't know where we're going.

How can they not be cute?

They're so adorable.

(laughing) Living in America during the time that I've lived in America, it often felt like there is one way to do this, or one way to do that.

(soft music continues) And Dad, he was always wearing a suit and tie.

Those look like all his friends, and they must be eating, it looks like pretty good food.

(chuckles) Our literature has been so dominated by other voices for so long that the way that I've written about grief adds to that diversity of voices.

It's a new way of thinking about something.

And by the way, new ways of thinking about things happen and have happened throughout history.

It's just a matter of getting those voices out and acknowledging that those voices mean something too.

(soft music continues) - Set in a fictional New York City public housing project in 1969, "Deacon King Kong" begins with a shooting.

But former journalist James McBride's tragic comic novel, it's not a who done it, it's a why I done it.

Written with warmth and tenderness, McBride infuses each of his characters with intricate backstories that humanize and intertwine them.

From the old bumbling church deacon who pulled the trigger to the feared, but talented young drug dealer he shot.

From Italian mobsters to Irish cops to Black church ladies.

This is not a story of urban isolation, but rather, it's a story of connected in human cacophony.

As he did in his memoir, "The Color of Water," which won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for non-fiction in 1997, McBride again, richly imagines the love, violence, and everything in between that forge a community.

For his multilayered and generative understanding of so many different ways to be human, James McBride is the recipient of this year's Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction.

- "Deacon Cuffy Lambkin of Five ends Baptist Church became a walking dead man on a cloudy September afternoon in 1969.

That's the day the old deacon, known as Sportcoat to his friends, marched out to the plaza of the Causeway Housing Projects in South Brooklyn, stuck an ancient 38 Colt in the face of a 19-year-old drug dealer named Deems Clemens and pulled the trigger.

There were a lot of theories floating around the projects as to why old Sportcoat, a wiry, laughing brown-skinned man, who had coughed, wheezed, guffawed, and drank his way through the Cause Houses for a good part of the 71 years, shot the most ruthless drug dealer projects had ever seen.

He had no enemies.

He had coached the project's baseball team for 14 years.

His late wife, Hettie, had been the Christmas club treasurer of his church.

He was a peaceful man beloved by all.

So what happened?"

(train rattling) (soft music continues) (cars passing) This is my world here.

I don't really know what happens outside of my little world because most of it isn't pertinent to becoming a good writer.

I think if you're gonna write about a community or about people or about events, you have to be around people.

You have to take the subway.

You have to ride the bus.

You gotta be around.

You gotta be standing around listening to people talk.

I feel like my strength comes from the fact that I spent an hour talking to this Puerto Rican guy this morning in the corner named Rubin.

And he was (laughing) He was telling me some pretty funny stuff, and I'm not gonna use it, but it makes me fuller.

The thirst that drives a creative person has to be quenched with real things.

- [Radio Broadcaster] The city, aware of its responsibility to the living, build houses which asks no questions about a man's race or color or creed.

(soft music) 1939, Red Hook.

(soft music continues) - Red hook is part of the industrial poverty that the New York City Housing Authority represents.

And there are probably 40 or 45 housing projects in New York.

Red Hook is one of the biggest.

So certainly, life reflected in "Deacon King Kong."

There are some things that have happened in Red Hook.

"Deacon King Kong" is a humorous look at a community that most people see from behind the wheel of a tightly locked car.

It's about many things.

It's about a boy and a man.

It's about a man and his wife.

I wrote it because I like the people in it.

I like the people around here.

When you walk through this community, you see people of color, mostly.

They're all different.

So for me, the characters in "Deacon King Kong" are as different and varied as white people when they are in their Catholic church or Jewish temple.

They're all unique.

And my job as a writer is to serve the uniqueness by showing the reader how special each one of them is in their own way without judgment.

Because when there is judgment in writing, when there is judgment, there's no journey.

And writing is all about... Well, good writing is all about the journey.

(soft orchestra music) (cymbals clanging) (drums beating) All right, that's good.

Very good.

I'm crying.

Tip the band.

Tip the band.

Madison Square Garden, here we gonna come.

(laughing) We're at New Brown Memorial Baptist Church.

Church was founded by my parents in 1954.

People in this church, many of them, the ones who are still here, I've known all my life.

What the heck was that what?

Wait, no, no.

That last note was so out of tune, I thought it was a... All right, Jess is playing in the key of Z.

That's her favorite key, But these kids have been practicing down here.

This is only the second time they've played together.

So we're trying to teach them the business of jazz.

And we teach the business of music, but we just happen to be working with some jazz.

(cymbals clanging) Boom, boom, boom.

Good.

(cymbals clanging) Good.

The characters in "Deacon King Kong" were inspired by people that I met here and in other churches.

Those characters are pretty standard fare in any black church in any part of America in 1969.

Same people show up on Sunday and take their teeth out during the repass and compliment, and they put 'em back in their mouth.

It's a place where interesting things happen and good people live.

It's part of a misunderstood, in my opinion, misrepresented community.

You ready?

One, two, ready, and go, and... (piano playing) Stop!

Y'all are both fired, both of you.

You know what James Brown used to do?

Check this out.

When James Brown was dancing, he'd be going, "I've got the feeling, ah, ah," And then when somebody would make a mistake, he'd point to 'em.

He'd go like this.

He point and go.

And then he'd fine them $5.

So just like I'm James Brown.

♪ I've got the feeling ♪ 5, 5, 10 'cause he hadn't been practicing.

For me, it helps to fall into a world where there was at least some controlled explosion of life that I could witness as opposed to what's happening in the world now because I have no control of what happens in the world.

If I did, then we wouldn't be sitting in a church in the middle of a housing project that looks the same now as it looked when I was a boy half a century ago.

So it's a relief to walk into the world and experience, enjoying the people like Sportcoat, and Hot Sausage, and these other characters who knew how to show love.

And that's really what you see in church.

People who know how to show love.

All right.

(piano playing) Okay.

All right, now do that again without bending your wrist.

(piano playing) A novel is really a kind of a wish.

It's kind of a magical thing that you hope happens when you sit down to write.

And so you call on everything you can to make it go.

And you find that most of what you know doesn't work, just a small sliver, just a small slice of it works, 10% of it.

In the case of "Deacon King Kong," certainly a lot of the inspiration for it, if that's the word you wanna use, comes from being born here and spending time here and continuing to work in the church as a grown man.

It helps.

But ultimately, you're driven by your desire to make the world a little bit better and make people understand just a little bit more about things and people they might not necessarily know that much about.

(James laughing) He got mad 'cause he didn't wanna play the right melody at the very end, Boom, bomb, bomb, bomb.

(piano playing) All right, thank you.

All right, one more time.

(soft music continues) - We're all too familiar with the recitation of black history, both in the United States and globally, as an unrelenting catalog of sorrow and loss, slavery, Jim Crow, police brutality, and other structural racisms, but in "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War," historian Vincent Brown presents a different, far more nuanced story, detailing the strategic political revolt orchestrated by enslaved West Africans in Jamaica in the 18th century.

Even in the dire world of Caribbean slavery, Brown reminds us that black people were actors in their own story.

Brown meticulously plumbs the archive to split open the received British wisdom about the revolt, to represent the enslaved as engineers of a revolt, that though put down, in fact, destabilized the institution of Atlantic slavery and propelled it toward its eventual abolition.

For rewriting the traditional telling of a brutal era of history, Vincent Brown is the recipient of this year's Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for non-fiction.

- "Slaveholders cited black militancy as a justification for their brutality.

In response, late 18th century abolitionists would rally around the image of a kneeling supplicant begging to be recognized as a man and a brother as if the condemnation of evil required the meek innocence of its victims.

That icon of abjection has shaped the prevailing understanding of bondage and race to this day.

But the caricature bore no resemblance to the black fighters who stood toe-to-toe with whites in encounters all across the war-torn world of Atlantic slavery, from West Africa to the Americas.

(birds chirping) (soft music continues) We know a lot about how things that happen in Europe shape things that happen in the Americas.

We think about political developments in Europe and migration from Europe.

And we think about European wars, and their shaping influence on American history, but we have very little sense of all of the history in Africa that then plays itself out in the Americas.

I come from an old Chesapeake family, a family that's been in Virginia and its area for a very long time, maybe as far back as the 17th century.

So I kind of have a deep sense of the black history of the United States and of North America.

So that inspired a certain kind of curiosity in me about where we came from and what these stories are.

When I was in high school and college, I actually thought I was gonna go into theater.

I was from Southern California, so I spent some time auditioning in LA.

And I think I learned pretty quickly that it was gonna be difficult for me to work in an industry where I wasn't able to write my own rules.

The kind of parts that were available, especially to black actors, in the late 80s and early 90s, were not parts that I was well-suited to.

The parts that they wanted were what they call urban parts.

And that wasn't my experience.

And so while I think I was a good enough trained actor, I could've portrayed that.

I didn't think that those were the rules that I wanted to portray, that I wanted to play, and so I went into a business where I thought I could write my own history.

I don't think there are a lot of people who read history that deeply.

They may know a few stories that are repeated over and over and over again.

They know a few iconic historical figures like your George Washington's and your Thomas Jefferson's.

Hopefully now, your Harriet Tubman's.

But for the most part, there are these events that are more obscure despite the fact that they were hugely important at the time.

A lot of people don't know that there weren't just 13 British American colonies.

There were 26.

And by far.

the most profitable, most militarily significant, best politically connected of those colonies were those colonies in the Caribbean.

And Jamaica was Great Britain's most profitable colony on the eve of the American Revolution.

So when we see a major slave revolt happening in 1760 in Great Britain's most important colony, we're seeing one of the most important things that happened in the history of America up to that point.

What I wanted was to connect up what's happening in Africa, what's happening in the Caribbean, what's happening in North America, what's happening in Europe, all within this one story.

And what I settled on was the best way to tell the story was to tell it as a story of movement, to tell it as a story of the trajectory of all of these people who were involved in the slave revolt and follow them around from Europe to Africa, to North America and through the Caribbean.

"Tacky's Revolt" is about the largest slave revolt in the 18th century British Empire, which occurred in Jamaica in 1760 and went on into 1761.

It's not very well known outside of Jamaica itself, even though, it was in part in reaction to "Tacky's Revolt" that many people thought slavery as a dangerous enterprise for empires to be engaged in.

And that in some ways gave an early impetus to the abolitionist movement in the Anglo-Atlantic world.

It's really difficult to do black history at times.

In part, because to the extent that our history emerges from the history of slavery, the records that record the history of slavery are not records, in large part, produced by black people.

Black people, we find in the records of slave societies on property lists.

They're there listed alongside the cows and the pigs and the sheep on plantations.

We don't have a number of diaries from enslaved people.

For example, we have the diaries of overseers.

And so when people hear the word slavery and slave, they tend to think about a slave as merely an extension of a slave holders will.

That's the idea of a slave and the perspective of slaveholders.

And it tends to obscure the intentions of the people who were enslaved.

It tends to obscure their histories, tends to obscure their desires.

And so one of the things that I'm trying to do here is write about the history of the enslaved more than the history of slavery as an institution.

Edward Long, a historian and Jamaican planter wrote about "Tacky's Revolt" in his 1774 three-volume history of Jamaica.

But of course, he was someone who experienced the revolt firsthand.

He is someone who hated Africans, was definitely not in favor of the revolt, and was a slave owner himself.

And so I thought that we needed a kind of an account that wasn't largely based on his account, which is one of the reasons I went into so much detail on the revolt, is because I was in some ways, trying to revise, trying to replace this account from Edward Long in 1774.

It was important to go into that level of detail in some ways to honor the actions of those people who are not usually honored with that level of detail in the description of their history.

I wanted to have a blow-by-blow account of this slave revolt.

And so I thought that by putting those on the landscape, taking everything I learned and plotting it on a map and a timeline, I could discern why people move the way they did, why they move through the landscape in particular ways.

And that's one of the things that I was able to do by really identifying every location that was listed in my sources.

Arthur Forrest, who was a captain in the British Royal Navy, one of the principal leaders of the 1760 slave revolt, and we know from these property records that he owned 650 acres in the parish of Westmoreland where Wager started that revolt.

So we know from one of these maps where Forrest's plantation was in Westmoreland.

We know it was called Maismare.

And then we see that Maismare was just down the hills from what's listed here as the Rebels Barricade.

On this topographical map, we can see that the Rebels Barricade was just up in this detached mountain range here.

And you can see that they thought this detached mountain range here would be defensible.

But one of the things I'm trying to do is add to our collective store of stories about the past, about the past that's relevant to us.

And to the extent that we think that the history of freedom is relevant to us, the history of slave revolt has to be relevant to us.

And we certainly can't understand the history of freedom if we're not understanding the history of slaves who were rebelling for their freedom.

- Born in Mississippi on Confederate Memorial day in 1966, Natasha Trethewey's existence was the result of an interracial marriage, still illegal in the state at the time of her birth.

In richly poetic prose, the former United States Poet Laureate captures the collective trauma events by growing up black in a society in which black lives were systematically devalued.

But this is also the powerful story of personal tragedy.

the murder of her mother in 1985 at the hands of her abusive ex-husband.

Trethewey blends her own self-reflection with her mother's concrete and straightforward account of violence.

Reproduced from the police record, the lyrical voice of the poet emerges through the act of transcribing her mother's own voice.

For turning wounds into words that memorialize a life trapped by, yet transcending it circumstances, Natasha Trethewey is the recipient of this year's Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for non-fiction.

- "Often, when I'm alone on the road, I think of traveling back to Mississippi each summer with my mother.

The year before I was old enough to drive, she let me practice steering the car on long stretches of empty highway.

I'd reach across the center console and take the wheel, leaning into her, my back against her chest, following the arc of the sun west toward home.

For several miles, we drive like that.

So close, we seemed conjoined.

And I could feel her heart beating against me as if I had not one, but two."

(seagull squawking) (soft music continues) This is me and my former life as a two-time All-American cheerleader.

This is my toe touch.

I can't do that anymore.

(laughing) The need for precision in cheerleading is something that I think poetry also absolutely needs.

See, for example, this is a herky, but it looks like I'm doing a split because I kick out and my herky is pretty precise.

But if you look at that arm there, that is not precise.

So that would be something in a poem that... Like a word out of place that I would work on again and again to fix.

After my own success as a writer and more attention being paid to my work, I noticed that when people wrote about me, they'd often mention my backstory.

And in the backstory, there was my mother.

And when they mentioned my mother, they mentioned her often as an afterthought, as a footnote, as a murdered woman, a victim.

This one is a picture of my mother after she finished her Master's of Social Work, and was working at the Capitol building in Atlanta.

I love how happy and lovely she looks.

So I decided that I needed to be the one to write about her, to tell the story of her tremendous strength and courage and her impact on me on making me a writer.

The title "Memorial Drive" holds for me both literal and figurative possibilities.

It's literally the road on which my mother was killed, the road on which she died.

It's also the road that leads to the nation's largest monument to the Confederacy, Stone Mountain, where you see the carvings of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis, emblazoned even bigger than the carvings on Mount Rushmore.

Figuratively, it is about my impulse and my entire project as a writer to remember and to memorialize.

I tend to write about photographs a lot.

They are often the object that I will go to as a kind of prompt to get me thinking about something.

These were taken outside of my grandmother's house; my father in his baseball uniform and me and his cap.

I came to writing to make sense of two existential wounds.

One, this wound we've been talking about.

The wound that never heals, losing my mother when I was 19.

The other wound, my earlier wound, is a wound of history, the wounds of American racism, the wounds that I felt being born in Mississippi in 1966 when interracial marriage was still illegal.

And I was rendered in the law of my home state illegitimate, persona non grata.

(page flipping) I write to grapple with those two wounds.

This is a place that I write down, the kind of interstitial meta parts of "Memorial drive."

And this one is one of those short pages about trying to start writing this memoir, to start writing about her.

And I'm talking about the different ways that I write, how everything is so scattered.

That section ends with me doing research about fire, how a car might catch on fire.

And I wake up the next morning and my house burns.

That's what this passage is about.

It took me about seven years to write this book.

It took so long because I wanted to get it right.

I spent a very long time writing the first chapter of the book, which is mostly about my family and my mother's family in Mississippi.

when my parents were still married, up until about when I was six years old.

And I took so long because I didn't wanna leave it.

I didn't wanna leave those years.

It took me a long time to write the rest of it because I had to go to dark places that I'd been spending my whole adult life forgetting.

(drawer sliding) I waited a long time before I looked at the police records.

These are all of the police files that I was given back in 2005.

In 2005, the police officer who had been the first on the scene the morning of my mother's murder, stopped me because he recognized me and told me that after 20 years they purge the records and that he could rescue them for me.

And he gave them to mem and he said, with a bottle of wine, "You're gonna need this."

That was one of the hardest things for me to look at, but it's meant everything to me to at least have them.

These are some of the transcripts of the phone conversations.

I decided to make use of the transcripts in "Memorial Drive," because it would've been one thing for me to, as daughter, tell you how remarkable my mother was and how strong and determined and resilient she was, or I could let you see it in her own words.

I wanted you as a reader to see who my mother was.

I've written about this particular image many times, and in different ways.

Sometimes, I'm taking note of my mother's finger.

It's so small, you can barely see it, but it's the way that she's marking me or stilling me because obviously, I'm being a little impish and misbehaving 'cause I'm not standing up straight.

I love these pictures of us.

(soft music continues) - In a career spanning nearly six decades, the prolific Samuel R. Delaney has published an arrange of genres, including a novel, literary criticism, and memoir.

He's universally known as a foundational figure in the genre of science fiction for sweeping dystopian tales like "Dahlgren" and inventive interstellar fantasies like "Babel-17."

In addition, Delaney, known to his friends as Chip, a nickname he gave himself as a child in summer camp, is also a fearless pioneer of gay literature.

His memoir, "The Motion of Light and Water" is a brave and unflinching portrait of a life that ran counter to the mainstream culture of the 1960s.

Science fiction allows space for transgressive worlds in ways that real genres may not.

Look at his novel "Triton" depicting a society on Neptune's moon free of sexual and gender normativity.

Or the post apocalyptic world of the fall of the towers trilogy, which is set far in the future in which distinguishing races, based on the amount of melanin in their skin, is not possible.

For creating fantastic new worlds that invite us to better recon with the real worlds in which we find ourselves, Samuel R. Delaney is the recipient of this year's Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement.

- "Look for shadow in this double-lit mist.

A dark communion in the burning streets between the landscape and the smarting senses suggests more sterile agonies.

Clouds out of control decoct anticipation.

What use can any of us have for two moons?

The miracle of order has run out, and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen."

(upbeat music) All of the Cézannes, I think are wonderful.

(Samuel chuckles) I think of my career as just like being on the inside of a balloon.

And you're trying to explain to people what it may look like from the outside.

I don't know what it looks like from the outside.

Trying to make a balloon look like something from the outside from the inside is a pretty complicated thing.

Eventually, you just give up and let it take the shape it is.

I'm a writer.

That's all.

(upbeat music continuous) If you're born in New York, and you spent your first 70 years there, you're a New Yorker.

I was born at Harlem Hospital.

I grew up on Seventh Avenue where my father had a funeral parlor.

His business was on the ground floor, and we lived on the second and third floor.

Oh, I wanted to be everything.

I wanted to be a psychiatrist, and I wanted to be a nuclear physicist.

And I wanted to be a singer and a music arranger.

But I decided to put my effort into the writing, which is what I've done since.

There are two kinds of dwellings.

There are barracks and there are hovels.

(chuckles) I've always lived in a hovel.

(Samuel mumbling) I've made my first attempt to write a novel when I was 13 or 14.

And I finished one at 15 called "Scavengers," which if you have read, "Dhalgren," which is written 10, 12 years later, it seems like a very similar idea.

There was a lot of scavenging (chuckles) in "Dhalgren."

I have never been particularly concerned with this genre, but I started off publishing science fiction.

And so for most people, I'm a science fiction writer.

I never thought of myself as that.

Science fiction chose me.

My wife was an editor at that time, a small science fiction company, and so I wrote a book for her.

The first one that got published.

A book called "The Jewels of Aptor."

And that started the first genre which I made a name.

I don't think of myself as ever predicting anything.

Prediction is never been what for me science fiction was ever about, rather it's training for thinking about difference, and so that when we do have a different way, it doesn't come and blindside you.

I used to have a telephone.

Now I only have a cell phone.

The cell phone has gotta be one of the most awkward pieces of technology.

(chuckles) Inefficient cell phones are something I don't think we were ever taught how to deal with in science fiction.

I just like walking and looking, looking and walking.

I'm always finding out things that are fairly common knowledge to certain whole groups of people that I never encountered.

Why?

I was too busy writing.

- There's very few artists of any kind, who are alike Chip Delaney.

The fact that he just wrote banger after banger after banger.

Just classic, vital, important, weird, funky, irresistible novels.

And he had written books of non-fiction.

Chip Delaney goes from strength to strength.

You rarely get anyone like this.

The impact that he had as an African-American science fiction writer cannot be exaggerated.

(keyboard typing) - Eventually, he (mumbles) worked, he worked.

Writing takes a lot of time, and it takes up more time with me because I have dyslexia.

Where other people can get by with one superb brilliant craft, I have to write five, six, seven, twelve drafts.

Something like "Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders" was about seven years.

And while I'm busy writing, the world is always busy changing.

And you see this thing fell over and shattered.

They were gonna fix it and put it all in a new piece of glass.

And he said, "Uh uh, not on my life."

He said, "Chances is a big part of what goes on."

You break the glass, that's part of the artwork.

I write the kinds of books that I wish I could find to read.

And if I'm lucky enough, they survive and actually get into print.

What influences what gets published?

Chance.

(soft music) - We began the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards this year by taking a look back at our past, at Edith Anisfield Wolf and her vision that literature can change lives.

Up next, we meet Simone Miller from the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, who is developing her poetic voice.

- "I know they feel, but they conceal 'cause they say men don't cry and women are weak, so their lives are bleak."

- Poetry is magical.

Nice, but more so like you're having a conversation.

- Yeah.

- Like you wouldn't in a conversation, go.

"I know people."

Children and adults, we use language on a daily basis to communicate, so to be able to teach them how to a trust language as an art form is a powerful tool for kids to have, to be able to just play, to play with language.

And hopefully, it's something they carry into their adult years.

"I know people, big and small.

They communicate by text and call."

My name is Nicole Robinson, and I have been working as a teaching artist for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards and The Cleveland Foundation for quite some years.

Every child leaves the workshop with a poem that they wrote and knowledge of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

- My name is Simone.

I'm going into sixth grade, and I'm 11.

I'm turning 12 in March.

I haven't done poetry in school or anything, so I didn't know much about it.

I felt like all poems were like rhyming and stuff, but now I know there are like different kinds of poems.

- Is there one of you that would like to volunteer to read the poem?

When I go into a classroom, this past year, it was on the computer on Zoom; we typically will read one of the historic award winners, and then we always try to read one of the poems by a new winner.

The first poem that we read together was Victoria Chang's "Barbie Chang."

- I remember the "Barbie Chang" one was about a Barbie, and it was like a Barbie going out in the world.

- And everyone was so excited to be able to write from the perspective of a toy.

The kids loved the idea.

They loved the concept.

And then we read "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes.

And so they loved that workshop as well because it gave them an opportunity to write about things that they know.

- The prompt was something you know.

And like a lot of kids were like, "I know my cat.

I know Christmas," stuff like that.

I just thought I kind of wanted to be unique about it.

And I know people, so obviously, it's somewhat about people, but it's also about like, no one's perfect and nothing you do is gonna be perfect.

Like no option you have is perfect.

- Just the sounds.

- [Simone] Yeah.

- Simones poem has moments of depth and real seriousness.

But wow!

Carrying the musicality and the rhythm that seemed really sophisticated for a child her age.

- I definitely like kind of feeling the flow, and it's like, if you try it, it's really fun to just think of all the rhyming words, which is what I mostly do.

I just like thinking of the rhymes and also making it actually mean something as well as it sounds good People.

"People.

I know people big and small.

They communicate by text and call.

I know they feel, but they conceal 'Cause men don't cry and women are weak.

So their lives are bleak.

They call each other names.

They separate normal and fame, but still they explore.

Some are kind, some are mean a bore.

Some make villages and bridges.

Some make walls and trust falls.

People don't follow rules, so they make cages and tales when others fail, I know the human lows, the places they leave and the places they go, the TVs and the online shows.

The glow on their faces when they get a new item, always wanting more, digging to the core.

Plastic floats, building moats.

I know the evil and the good, how they say you should or that's a bad idea.

Surely in a couple years, I will know less fear and tears.

(soft music continues) (upbeat music) (energetic music) - [Announcer] Funding of the Ideastream Public Media production of the 86th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards was provided by The Cleveland Foundation.