Caleb Gayle, associate professor of journalism and Africana studies at Northeastern University in Boston, has received the 2026 Stubbendieck Great Plains Book Prize from the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Professor Gayle was honored for his latest book, Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State (Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House, 2025). The award-winning monograph recounts the story of Edward McCabe, a Black man who tried to establish a U.S. state governed by and for Black people.
Alongside his career in academia, Professor Gayle is a journalist who writes about the history of race and identity. In addition to Black Moses, Professor Gayle is the author of We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power (Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House, 2022) and What Was the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921? (Penguin Workshop, 2023).
A graduate of the University of Oklahoma, Professor Gayle holds a master’s degree from the University of Oxford in England, a master of public policy degree from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Before joining the Northeastern faculty, Professor Gayle taught at the City College of New York and New York University.
