U.S. speedskater and World Cup Champion Erin Jackson claimed a gold medal today in the 500-meter individual speed skating final at the Beijing Olympics, becoming the first Black woman to win an individual gold medal in any Winter Olympics.
Jackson, 29, is a former inline skater who made the US team for the 2018 Olympics after only four months on the ice. Jackson’s win also marked the United States’ first gold in the 500m since Bonnie Blair won three straight from 1988 through 1994.
“Hopefully, this has an effect,” Jackson said. “Hopefully, we’ll see more minorities, especially in the USA, getting out and trying these winter sports. I just hope to be a good example.”
The Ocala, FL native finished 0.08 seconds ahead of Japan’s Miho Takagi in second and 0.17 seconds ahead of the Russian Olympic Committee’s Angelina Golikova in third.
The National Book Foundation announced the 2021 National Book Awards winners list yesterday. Author and poet Jason Mott won the fiction prize for Hell of a Book, while author and historian Tiya Miles garnered the nonfiction prize for All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.Mott’s Hell of a Book tells the story of an author on a promotional tour and his haunted past and present in a surreal, narrative style.
“I would like to dedicate this award to all the other mad kids, to all the outsiders, the weirdos, the bullied,” he said in his acceptance speech. “The ones so strange they had no choice but to be misunderstood by the world and by those around them. The ones who, in spite of this, refuse to outgrow their imagination, refuse to abandon their dreams and refuse to deny, diminish their identity, or their truth, or their loves, unlike so many others.”
Miles’ All That She Carried traces the history of an American family through a cotton sack an enslaved ancestor gave to her daughter in the 19th century as they were about to be separated and sold apart.
In her acceptance speech, Miles thanked her editor Molly Turpin for championing her decision to write a book about “an old bag.” “Your face lit up,” Miles said. “You were so curious. You were so receptive. You were the perfect editor for this project.”
Other winners include Malinda Lo for young people’s literature with Last Night at the Telegraph Club — a story of same-sex, cross-cultural love set in the 1950s.
Martín Espada took the poetry prize with Floaters, and best translation went to Elisa ShuaDusapin‘s Winter in Sokcho, translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins.
Winners in competitive categories each receive $10,000.
Established in 1950, the National Book Awards are intended to celebrate the following core beliefs:
Books are essential to a thriving cultural landscape
Books and literature provide a depth of engagement that helps to protect, stimulate, and promote discourse in American society
Books and literature are for everyone, no matter where the reader is situated geographically, economically, racially, or otherwise
Judging panels looked through more than 1,800 submitted books. This year’s judges included acclaimed authors such as Eula Biss, Ilya Kaminsky and Charles Yu, winner in 2020 of the National Book Award for fiction.
Esteemed poet, professor and activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, has been awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for being an artist who “has pushed the boundaries of an art form” and “contributed to social change.” The prize includes a cash award of $250,000.
Sanchez has been a leading figure of the 1960s Black Arts Movement, having written more than 20 books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, I’ve Been a Woman, A Sound Investment and Other Stories, Homegirls and Handgrenades, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend(1995),Does Your House Have Lions? (1997), Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (1998), Shake Loose My Skin(1999), Morning Haiku(2010) and most recently, Collected Poems (2021).Her subjects range from Black culture, feminism, civil rights, philosophy and peace, and Sanchez, according to the New York Times, “is known for melding musical formats like the blues with traditional poetic forms like the haiku and tanka, using American Black speech patterns and experimenting with punctuation and spelling.”“When we come out of the pandemic, it’s so important that we don’t insist that we go back to the way things were,” Sanchez said to the New York Times. “We’ve got to strive for beauty, which is something I’ve tried to do in my work.”
Other notable recipients of the Gish Prize include artists such as Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, Suzan-Lori Parks, Walter Hood and Chinua Achebe.
Among dozens of distinguished honors that Sanchez has received throughout her life Sanchez has also received the 1985 American Book Award for Homegirls and Handgrenades, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities for 1988, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award for 1999, the Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Robert Frost Medal and the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ inaugural Leadership Award.
Stacey Abrams has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work to promote voting rights via Fair Fight in Georgia and the United States overall.
“Abrams’ work follows in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s footsteps in the fight for equality before the law and for civil rights,” said Lars Haltbrekken, a member of Norway’s parliament.
“Abrams’ efforts to complete King’s work are crucial if the United States of America shall succeed in its effort to create fraternity between all its peoples and a peaceful and just society,” Haltbrekken said.
Other candidates this year include the Black Lives Matter movement, the World Health Organization, U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Lee and climate campaigner Greta Thunberg.
According to Reuters the Nobel Committee in Norway, which decides who wins the award, does not comment on nominations but nominators can choose to reveal their picks.
Petter Eide, a member of Norway’s parliament, nominated Black Lives Matter for a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of the movement’s continuous work towards manifesting racial justice in the U.S. and across the globe.
“To carry forward a movement of racial justice and to spread that to other countries is very, very important. Black Lives Matter is the strongest force today doing this, not only in the U.S. but also in Europe and in Asia,” Eide told USA TODAY.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 in recognition for his work and mission of non-violent protest during the Civil Rights Movement.
Albert Luthuli and Nelson Mandela won in 1960 and 1993, respectively, for their campaigns against racial discrimination and apartheid in South Africa.
Additionally, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation has won Sweden’s Olof Palme human rights prize for 2020, for promoting “peaceful civil disobedience against police brutality and racial violence” according to the prize’s organizers.
Patrice Cullors, one of the original founders of Black Lives Matter, will accept the $100,000 on behalf of BLM during an online ceremony today.
According to cbc.ca, Maryam Tsegaye, a 17 year-old student at École McTavish Public High School, became the first Canadian to win the $500,000 International Breakthrough Junior Challenge, a prize that includes a scholarship and new science lab for her school.
The competition asks students from around the globe to create a video which explains a scientific principle for the public.
Fort McMurray, Alberta resident Tsegaye took up the challenge and put together a three-minute video explaining quantum tunnelling:
Tsegaye spent two weeks creating her video, comparing quantum tunnelling to rolling dice and playing video games.
“I just had a lot of time over quarantine and I just decided to enter,” Tsegaye said to CBC. “In previous years, I always hesitated from entering because I was really intimidated by all the other competitors.”
About 5,600 students sent in entries. The competition’s prize is a $250,000 US scholarship, $100,000 toward a science lab for her high school and $50,000 cash for the teacher who inspired her.
The son of Ugandan immigrants to the U.K, Kiwanuka won this third time after having been nominated twice before for previous albums: Home Again (2012) and Love & Hate (2016).
“I’m over the moon, so so excited,” he said on receiving the prize. “This [prize] is for art, for music, for albums – it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, so to win a Mercury is a dream come true… It’s blown my mind.” He wins £25,000.
His album, released in November 2019, draws equally from folk and soul as the songwriter sings of freedom, love, and struggles both personal and collective; one track samples protests during the 1960s US civil rights movement. It was described in a Guardian review as a “bold, expansive, heartfelt, sublime album. He’s snuck in at the final whistle, but surely this is among the decade’s best.” It reached No 2 on release, and spent 18 weeks in the UK charts.
He thanked his producers, Inflo and Danger Mouse, “some of the best musicians, artists, creatives around, they’ve really helped me grow.” Asked why he given the album his name, he said he had experienced “imposter syndrome … it was taking things away from the experience of doing my dream job. So I made a decision when I was making this album that I wanted to be myself, enjoy it, and not hold back, and show myself as clear as I can be.”
Kiwanuka said an additional reason why his 2019 release title was eponymous was to honor his African heritage.
Candice Carty-Williams and Bernardine Evaristo just won Book of the Year and Author of the Year at the British Book Awards, respectively, becoming the first Black authors to win these top prizes.
According to guardian.com, Carty-Williams won Book of the Year for Queenie, her debut novel about a young black woman navigating life and love in London. The award is judged on quality of writing, innovation of publishing, and sales.
“Carty-Williams said she was proud and grateful to win, but also “sad and confused” that she was the first Black writer to receive the top award.
“Overall, this win makes me hopeful that although I’m the first, the industry are waking up to the fact that I shouldn’t and won’t be the last,” said the author.
“The power of Queenie is the way it makes you feel: energised; moved; comforted. It is such an assured and original piece of debut fiction,” said judge Pandora Sykes. “Weighty issues about identity, race, family, heterosexuality and mental health are distilled into prose which is easily digestible, but extremely impactful.”
Evaristo, the joint winner of last year’s Booker prize for her polyphonic novel Girl, Woman, Other, was named author of the year at the British Book awards, also making her the first black writer to win in that category.
Evaristo also won the fiction category, beating her fellow Booker winner Margaret Atwood to the prize. The novelist, who became the first black British woman to top the fiction paperback charts earlier this month, said she was honoured.
“This is such an interesting moment in our cultural history because the Black Lives Matter movement has generated an unprecedented amount of self-interrogating in the publishing industry,” said Evaristo, who described her recent experience topping the charts as “quite surreal.”
(photo of wrongfully convicted brothers Wiley Bridgeman and Kwame Ajamu via moguldom.com)
Earlier this month, the city of Cleveland agreed to pay a combined $18 million to Rickey Jackson, Wiley Bridgeman and his brother Kwame Ajamu, three men who spent decades in prison for a 1975 killing they did not commit, according to cleveland.com.
The trio reached this settlement during an 12-hour mediation held by U.S. District Judge Dan Polster, and will end the lawsuits each man filed for the time they spent behind bars.
The men, now in their 60s, were convicted of murder in 1975 for the shooting of money order collector Harold Franks at what was then the Fairmont Cut Rate Store on the city’s East Side. The trio maintained their innocence and were cleared in 2014.
Jackson had served 39 years in prison and was believed at the time to have served the longest amount of time behind bars of anyone wrongfully convicted of a crime.
Ajamu, with tears frequently streaming down his face, said they were accepting the settlement because “we now know that you have no other reason and no other recourse but to tell the world that you wronged three little black boys 45 years ago.”
While thanking his lawyers Terry Gilbert and Jacqueline Greene of Friedman & Gilbert, Ajamu expressed gratitude but did not downplay the long fight he, his brother and friend undertook to clear their names.
“Money cannot buy freedom and money certainly does not make innocence,” said Ajamu, who in addition to Gilbert and Greene was also represented by attorney David Mills.
A jury in August 1975 found Jackson, Bridgeman and Ajamu, then known as Ronnie Bridgeman, guilty of murdering Franks. They were also convicted of trying to kill store owner Anna Robinson. Cuyahoga County prosecutors relied on the eyewitness testimony of young Eddie Vernon to prove their case.
A judge sentenced the men to death, though the sentences were reduced to life in 1978 when the state enacted a short-lived moratorium on the death penalty.
Nearly 40 years later, Vernon recanted his testimony and judges overturned the men’s criminal convictions. Vernon, who was 12 years old when Franks was killed, said in 2014 that city detectives pressured him to lie on the witness stand, which included threats to jail his parents, and that police manipulated him.
Bridgeman, 65, and Jackson, 63, were released in 2014 with the help of the Ohio Innocence Project, which obtained Vernon’s recantation. Ajamu, 62, was paroled in 2003. The story of the murder and the work done to secure their freedom was chronicled in a book called “Good Kids, Bad City” written by Kyle Swenson, now a reporter for The Washington Post who covered the case for the alternative weekly Cleveland Scene.
And, posthumously, the one and only Ida B. Wells was awarded a special citation for her reporting on lynchings in the late-19th and early 20th century.
The Pulitzer Prize awards were established in 1917 through money provided in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher. The Pulitzers are given yearly in twenty-one categories. In twenty of the categories, each winner receives a certificate and a US $15,000 cash award. The winner in the public service category is awarded a gold medal.
With his win for “The Nickel Boys,” Colson Whitehead becomes the fourth fiction writer to win the prize two times (Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner and John Updike are the other three) and the first African American writer to pull off that feat.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer at The New York Times Magazine, (whose Twitter handle, btw, is Ida Bae Wells, an homage to the woman who serendipitously was also honored by Pulitzer this year), mixed U.S. history and personal anecdote in her essay for the “The 1619 Project,” which worked to re-center the contributions of African-Americans, including enslaved people, to American history.
To quote from 
According to 
Evaristo, the joint winner of last year’s Booker prize for her polyphonic novel 
“Money cannot buy freedom and money certainly does not make innocence,” said Ajamu, who in addition to Gilbert and Greene was also represented by attorney David Mills.
With his win for “The Nickel Boys,” Colson Whitehead becomes the fourth fiction writer to win the prize two times (Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner and John Updike are the other three) and the first African American writer to pull off that feat.