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CLEVELAND, Ohio – The Cleveland Foundation on Monday announced the winners of the 88th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. The 2023 recipients of the only national juried prize for literature that confronts racism and explores diversity are as follows:

• Geraldine Brooks, “Horse,” Fiction (Viking)
• Lan Samantha Chang, “The Family Chao,” Fiction (W.W. Norton)
• Matthew F. Delmont, “Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad,” Nonfiction (Viking)
• Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Lifetime Achievement
• Saeed Jones, “Alive at the End of the World,” Poetry (Coffee House Press)

The Anisfield-Wolf winners will be honored Thursday, Sept. 28 at the Maltz Performing Arts Center at Case Western Reserve University, marking the second consecutive year at the venue. The awards will anchor the eighth annual Cleveland Book Week. For additional information, a complete list of the recipients since 1935, and to learn more about The Asterisk* podcast featuring previous winners, visit www.Anisfield-Wolf.org.

"These remarkable books deliver groundbreaking insights on race and diversity,” said Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., who chairs the jury and is a Black scholar and Harvard University researcher who serves as the annual host of the event. “This year, we honor a profound and funny novel centered in a Chinese restaurant, a brilliant story of 19th-century horse-racing with contemporary echoes, a stunning poetry collection that captures who we are now, and a meticulous history that recasts our understanding of World War II. All are capped by the lifetime achievement of Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who remade this country with her courage and her nuanced reporting.”

Dr. Gates directs The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, where he is also the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. Joining him in selecting the winners each year are poet Rita Dove, novelist Joyce Carol Oates, psychologist Steven Pinker and historian Simon Schama.

Karen R. Long, manager of the book awards at the Cleveland Foundation, noted the prescience of philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf in founding the prize in 1935. “Her notion that literature can ignite justice is valid nearly 90 years later, and we are honored to add the 2023 winners to the canon,” Long said. “We are proud the newest books tackle the toughest topics and insist on ways forward.”

Past winners include seven writers who later won Nobel prizes – Ralph J. Bunche, Nadine Gordimer, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, Gunnar Myrdal, Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott. They are among the 262 recipients of the prize.

About the 2023 Winners

Geraldine Brooks, 67, crafted her ninth book, “Horse” to imagine the relationship between Lexington, a legendary antebellum American racehorse, and his Black groom, Jarret, as the stallion rises to greatness. The novel toggles between the 1850s, the 1950s and 2019, where a pair of young D.C. intellectuals are caught up in the horse’s story through art and science. What resulted, according to Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Jury Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr., is “a dazzling achievement, a brilliant example of how to turn historical events into a fiction that stands on its own.” Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for “March.” A native of Australia, she graduated from the University of Sydney before working as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. Brooks went on to earn her master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and worked as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She lives in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and was named an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2016.

Lan Samantha Chang, 58, crafted “The Family Chao” – which earned a spot on Barack Obama’s 2022 summer reading list – as a comedic retelling of Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” through the lens of a dysfunctional Chinese-American family. They own a restaurant in small-town Wisconsin until the patriarch is murdered and others rush to impose a sinister twist on their American dream. Anisfield-Wolf Juror Joyce Carol Oates extolled the novel as “an outstanding work of fiction”’ that she found to be exceptionally accomplished and ambitious. Chang has directed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for 17 years. She graduated from Yale University and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She herself is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. The American Academy in Berlin, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation all granted her fellowships. Earlier books include “All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost” and “Hunger.” She lives with her husband and daughter in Iowa City, Iowa.

Matthew F. Delmont, 45, is a historian whose “Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad” explores the vital contributions that Black men and women made to the United States’ victorious effort in World War II, only to return home to find segregation and racism athwart their schools, communities and jobs. “The role of African Americans in World War II rewrites our understanding of ‘the greatest generation’ in the ‘good war,’ given the shocking discrimination and harassment of millions of patriots willing to risk their lives in it,” Anisfield-Wolf Juror Steven Pinker notes. “The tension between the America-vs.-Fascism clash and the White-America-vs.-Black-America clash highlights the way in which humans belong to multiple overlapping coalitions, and how a recognition of these contradictions can lead to moral and historical shifts.” Delmont received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University and his master’s and doctorate in American studies from Brown University. He is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He lives in Etna, New Hampshire, with his family.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault, 81, made history and chronicled it as a journalist, author and lecturer. Alongside her high school classmate, Hamilton Holmes, she desegregated the University of Georgia in 1961 amid taunts, tear gas, vandalism and a riot. She graduated in 1963, embarking on a storied career in journalism that began at The New Yorker. She was the first Black writer for “Talk of the Town.” The assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. interrupted a brief stint in graduate school and led Hunter-Gault to join the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. She then went on to The New York Times – establishing the paper’s Harlem bureau – and then PBS, where she won numerous Emmy and Peabody awards. Hunter-Gault became NPR’s chief correspondent in Africa and then CNN’s Johannesburg bureau chief from 1999-2005. The following year, she published the book “New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa’s Renaissance.” A Peabody citation declared that she “demonstrated a talent for ennobling her subjects, and revealed a depth of understanding of the African experience that was unrivaled in Western media.” Hunter-Gault, mother of daughter Suesan Stovall and son Chuma Gault, currently lives in Sarasota, Florida, with her husband, Ronald Gault.

Saeed Jones, 37, is a Pushcart Prize-winning poet and writer whose first collection of poetry, “Prelude to Bruise,” was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His 2019 memoir, “How We Fight for Our Lives,” won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction. “Alive at the End of the World,” Jones’ second collection, contains 46 poems that sweep from strict verse to prose paragraphs. Anisfield-Wolf Juror Rita Dove calls the book “an aching reminder that a queer Black man leads a meta existence; he cannot live without thinking about living, constantly negotiating the everyday with an eye to the peril that can intrude at any time, from police violence to the minutest reactions from highbrow bigots.” Jones, who moved from New York City to Columbus, Ohio in 2019, received his bachelor’s from Western Kentucky University and his master’s from Rutgers University-Newark. He was the founding LGBTQ editor and the executive culture editor at BuzzFeed.

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, the most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog in Ohio and in the Midwest. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.

Pictured in the long view of this article are Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie J. Antonio (D-Lakewood) (center) a Lakewood Democrat, and state Sens. Steve Huffman (R-Tipp City) (2nd from rt), Hearcel F. Craig (D-Columbus) (far rt) and Michele Reynolds (R-Canal Winchester) (far lt)

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com

By Kathy Wray Coleman, associate publisher, editor-in-chief

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio Senate Minority Leader Nickie J. Antonio (D-Lakewood), a Lakewood Democrat, and state Sens. Steve Huffman (R-Tipp City), Hearcel F. Craig (D-Columbus) and Michele Reynolds (R-Canal Winchester) held a press conference this week at the statehouse in Columbus to discuss bipartisan legislation introduced by the lawmakers that, if passed, would put a historical end to Ohio's death penalty and make the most stringent sentence for a capital crime in Ohio life in prison without the possibility of parole. The announcement was followed by a public statement issued Friday by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost who said that while he opposes the bill and supports the death penalty "let’s open up the conversation and allow victims’ families to be heard.”

From 1981 through Dec. 31, 2022 people in Ohio have received a combined total of 341 death sentences, according to the recently released 2022 Capital Crimes Report, and of those 341 death sentences, only 56, or one in six, have been carried out.

Though Ohio is only 13 percent Black, Blacks make up more than half of the inmates on death row in the buckeye state. Once a pivotal state for presidential elections, the state has turned red since former president Donald Trump, a Republican making his third bid for the presidency in 2024, won it and the White House in 2016 over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and again in 2020 when he lost reelection to current President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

Flanked by the three other state senators sponsoring the bill, Antonio said at Tuesday's press briefing that "it is time for the state of Ohio to take the pragmatic, economically prudent and principled step to end capital punishment." Her newly carved 23rd state senate district, a byproduct of redistricting that took effect this year, includes state legislative districts 13, 14 and 15, parts of the cities of Lakewood, Euclid and Parma, and 14 of Cleveland's 17 wards. The state senator says that she is fighting for all of her constituents, and that seeking to end the death penalty continues to be part of her mission as a state lawmaker

"It will take all of us working together to make this kind of monumental change in Ohio," she said. "We join a growing call for abolition against a backdrop of public opinion, which increasingly favors life sentences over the use of the death penalty in Ohio and across the nation."

Antonio agrees that getting the bill through Ohio's Republican-dominated state legislature might be difficult as similar bills have failed But she says that this time around more people and more lawmakers are on board.

Only seven members of Ohio's 33-member senate are Democrats and of the 99 members in the Ohio House of Representatives only 32 are Democrats. Moreover, all of Ohio's statewide offices are held by Republicans, including the offices of governor, secretary of state and the state attorney general, all but three seats on the largely Republican Ohio Supreme Court, a relatively conservative court that is majority female and led by Chief Justice Sharon Kennedy, a Republican and former cop and social worker turned judge.

The controversial bill has bipartisan support with co-sponsorship from state Sens Blessing (R-Cincinnati), Craig (D-Columbus), DeMora (D-Columbus), Hicks-Hudson (D-Toledo), Ingram (D-Cincinnati), Lang (R-West Chester), Reynolds (R-Canal Winchester) Roegner (R-Hudson), Smith (D-Euclid), and Sykes (D-Akron). It is also supported by a host of Civil rights and other organizations, including the NAACP, which has long opposed the death penalty due to racial disparities and what it says is an intrinsically racist legal system that disenfranchises Blacks and other minority groups, and poor people.

The three other state senators who are sponsoring the bill with Antonio, state Sens. Steve Huffman (R-Tipp City), Hearcel F. Craig (D-Columbus) and Michele Reynolds (R-Canal Winchester), Huffman and Ryynolds Republicans and Craig a Democrat, also spoke at Tuesday's press conference, and like Antonio, they too are adamant about getting the bill passed.

"Like so many Ohioans, I once supported capital punishment and over time, with prayer and reflection, have come to believe it's the wrong policy for the state of Ohio," said state Sen Huffman with state Sen Craig adding that Ohio's death penalty is not equitably applied .

"It is clear that the death penalty is not a sentence being applied justly or fairly," said Sen Craig. "This remains a deeply complicated and deeply divided issue that has led to the real threat of wrongful executions." The state lawmaker went on to say that "this change does not ignore the importance of retribution and punishment but advances a fairer criminal justice system in Ohio."

State Sen Michelle Reynolds, the fourth sponsor of the bill and a Black state senator like Craig, added that "I believe that life begins at conception and ends in natural death. The death penalty, as it is applied today, devalues the dignity of human life. Human life should not be a bargaining chip.

Efforts to abolish the death penalty in Ohio have been underway for decades and and  supported by the majority of Ohioans. Opponents of the death penalty ague that it is a punishment that has shown to be administered with disparities across racial and economic lines And data also show that it has failed as a deterrent to violent crime and has prolonged the victimization of murder victims' families and loved ones through lengthy appeals processes.

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, the most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog in Ohio and in the Midwest. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.

Stormy Daniels’ mugshot from her arrest in Columbus, Ohio (Courtesy Photo/Columbus Division of Police)

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — The porn actress entangled in a case that ultimately led to the first criminal indictment against a former U.S. president also saw her own charges in Columbus, but she wasn’t the one who saw punitive action at the end of it.

Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, rose to fame beyond the adult industry over a $130,000 payment given to her before former President Donald Trump’s election in 2016. The payment was made as part of a nondisclosure agreement as Daniels was prepared to go public with claims she had a sexual relationship with Trump — an affair he denies.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE A NBC4I.COM

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, the most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog in Ohio and in the Midwest. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, the most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog in Ohio and in the Midwest. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.

CLEVELAND, Ohio- Cleveland activists are slated to picket and boycott Cleveland 19 News and reporter Kelly Kennedy of WOIO television, whom community activists of Cleveland say is slick, distrustful, and anti-Black. Cleveland 19 news cut all Black activists and organizers out of its March 28, 2023 coverage as to the 10-year anniversary of the Cleveland East 93rd Street serial murders using reporter Kelly Kennedy, who also cut out Black women and Black women organizers in a television news story when Women's March Cleveland protested this past summer with nearly 300 people at the Cuyahoga County administration building for reproductive resources, which were later granted by county council, the county board of control, and then county executive Armond Budish Kennedy, say activists, is allegedly operating to undermine them and to cover up their concerns as to the lack of police and other accountability regarding the heightened murders of Black women in Cleveland and the failure of politicians to address the problem.

The daughter of East 93rd Street Serial Murders murder victim Christine Malone, who asked Imperial Women Coalition to organized the annual rally as they usually do, said that both 19 News and News 5 Cleveland called the family ahead of Tuesday's anniversary rally and tried to interview them away from  activists but the family said no This is according to Angelique Malone, Christine's daughter.  After efforts failed to divide activists and the murder victims families News 5 Cleveland did not cover the event but  19 News and reporter Kelly Kennedy showed at the rally and cut out all Black activists and the march in subsequent news coverage. This was done in bad faith, say activists,  and with malice and likely racial animus too

The activists say that it is time to picket and boycott mainstream media racism and sexism in Cleveland against Blacks and Black women of Cleveland They say that Blacks should not be systematically excluded relative to mainstream media coverage in Cleveland This is the 21st century, they say.

Below is our story by Black Cleveland community activists leading up to the 10th anniversary of the Cleveland East 93rd Street Serial Murders rally on March 28, 2023 that caused the aforementioned controversy. Activists say that Kennedy stole their story leading up to the anniversary rally as her own and that of Cleveland 19 News, a WOIO affiliate, and then shut Black activists and Black women organizers out of her news story.

Staff article-March 26, 2023

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, the most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog in Ohio and in the Midwest. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.

CLEVELAND, Ohio- Tuesday, March 28, 2023 marks the 10-year anniversary of  the Cleveland East 93rd Street Serial Murders and community activists, led by Imperial Women Coalition, which has organized every anniversary rally and vigil since 2014, will hold a vigil at the intersection of East 93rd Street and Bessemer Avenue on the city's largely Black east side The event will also include the family members or supporters of murder victims Jazmine Trotter, Ashley Leszyeski, Christine Malone, and Jameela Hasan,  and  will be led by Malone's daughter, Angelique Malone, one of her surviving eight adult children.  Trotter's twin sister and mother will also speak, organizers said.

All four were killed along a two mile strip near East 93rd Street and Bessemer Avenue up to Harvard Avenue and 14 year- old Aliana Defreeze, a fifth murder victim, was also killed nearby, her killer caught, convicted, and now on death row. Other than Alianna, a teenager abducted on her way to school and later murdered, the killer or killers remain at large, and all of the murder victims were Black but Leszyeski.

"Our family will continue to participate in rallies to remember the victims and to work to bring their killer or killers to justice and we thank Kathy Wray Coleman and other community activists, and the media, for keeping this issue alive" said Angelique Malone, a daughter of murder victim Christine Malone, She added that "we want our mother's killer found and brought to justice as well as those of other Cleveland women whose killers are still out there running free."

Seasoned Cleveland activist Kathy Wray Coleman of Imperial Women Coalition, a grassroots group founded as to the murders of 11 Black women on Imperial Avenue by the late serial killer Anthony Sowell, has organized every rally and vigil and said that "something has to be done about these cold cases as well as escalating heinous violence against Black women in a predominantly Black city  like Cleveland." She said further that "we have been patient for so long as we continue to seek redress and public policy changes for the betterment of Black women of Cleveland, poor women, other women of color, and children who are subjected to unnecessary violence."

Hasan, 37, was  stabbed 17 times and murdered in December of 2012 in an east side apartment, and Malone, 45, and Trotter, 20, were both killed in March of 2013. Leszyeski, 21 at the time of her death, was murdered in May of 2013, and DeFreeze, a teenager, was murdered in January of 2017 in an abandoned home. Leszyeski was White and resided on the city's West Side, her body discovered in a vacant field on the city's east side, and with her hand cut off.

Malone's body was found in a field at the intersection of East 93rd street and Bessemer Avenue on March 28, 2013 where Tuesday's 10-year anniversary event will be held and Trotter's body was discovered under an abandoned home. March 28, 2023 marks 10 years to the day since Malone's body was found and her family is most active of the murdered women in rallying annually with community activists where her body was discovered to keep the unsolved murders before the public.

Alianna DeFreeze was murdered by previously convicted sex predator Christopher Whitaker, who was convicted of her murder and sentenced to death by Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge  Judge Carolyn Friedland. He chopped her body  into pieces in an abandoned home.

Affiliated greater Cleveland activist groups relative to the anniversary rally and vigil include Imperial Women Coalition,  Women's March Cleveland, the Laura Cowan Foundation, International Women's Day March Cleveland, Black Women's Army,  and Black on Black Crime Inc.

Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, the most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog in Ohio and in the Midwest. Tel: (216) 659-0473. Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.