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Posts tagged as “Walter Hood”

Poet and Activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, Wins the $250,000 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for 2021

Poet and Activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, Wins the $250,000 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for 2021

By goodblacknews on October 22, 2021

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.

Four African-American Academics Named MacArthur “Genius” Fellows in 2019

By goodblacknews on October 28, 2019
2019 MacArthur Fellows (l to r):Emmanuel Pratt, Saidiya Hartman, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Walter Hood (photos via MacArthur Foundation)

via jbhe.com

The Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation announced the selection of 26 individuals in this year’s class of MacArthur Fellows. The honors, frequently referred to as the “Genius Awards,” include a $625,000 stipend over the next five years which the individuals can use as they see fit.

Fellows are chosen for their “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits.” The goal of the awards is to “encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations” without the burden of having to worry about their financial situation.

This year, five of the 26 MacArthur Fellows are Black and four have current ties to academia:

Saidiya Hartman is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City. Professor Hartman’s major fields of interest are African American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, and performance studies.

She is the author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W.W. Norton, 2019). Dr. Hartman is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Walter Hood is a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning and urban design in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Blues & Jazz Landscape Improvisations (Poltroon Press, 1993).

Professor Hood is a graduate of North Carolina A&T State University. He holds two master’s degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master of fine arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.