Honors & Awards

Crystal Wilkinson Wins the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence

Crystal Wilkinson, the Appalachian Writer-in-Residence at Berea College in Kentucky, has won the 2016 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence presented by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. The award recognizes outstanding work by an African American fiction writer.

Donovan Hicks, Wofford College Graduate, Named a Mitchell Scholar

Hicks graduated from Wofford College with a double major in government and finance and was a Gates Millennium Scholar. As a junior he was selected as a Truman Scholar. He also served as vice president of the student body at Wofford College.

Washington University Scholar Named a Newspaper’s “Person of the Year”

Jason Q. Purnell, an assistant professor in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, was named person of the year by the St. Louis American, which has the largest circulation of any weekly newspaper in Missouri.

Swarthmore College President Honored by Hong Kong Baptist University

Valerie Smith, president of the highly rated Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, was the recipient of an honorary doctor of letters degree from Hong Kong Baptist University. Dr. Smith was honored for her work on diversity, inclusion, and curricular innovation during her first year as president of the Swarthmore.

Toni Morrison Selected to Receive the 2016 Emerson-Thoreau Medal

The award was established in 1958 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to recognize lifetime achievement in literature. Professor Morrison will be honored at a ceremony in April in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Newest Inductee Into the George Washington Carver Public Service Hall of Fame

Clinton V. Turner is the former associate vice president for agriculture and extension at Virginia State University. He is the first Virginian to be inducted into the the George Washington Carver Public Service Hall of Fame in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Rutgers University Creates an Endowed Chair in Honor of the Late Clement A. Price

The Rutgers University Board of Governors has approved the creation of the Clement A. Price Chair in Public History and the Humanities. Professor Price served on the Rutgers University faculty for nearly 40 years until his death in November 2014.

University of North Alabama Honors its First Black Graduate

In a case that lasted only 10 minutes, Wendell Wilkie Gunn, with the help of famed civil rights attorney Fred Gray, obtained a court order demanding that he be allowed to enroll at what is now the University of North Alabama. He did so on September 11, 1963 and graduated in 1965.

Notable Honors and Awards Relating to African Americans in Higher Education

Tisha Lewis Ellison, an assistant professor of education at the University of Georgia, was honored by the Literacy Research Association, and The Colored Conventions Project at the University of Delaware, led by Professor P. Gabrielle Foreman, will receive an award from the Modern Language Association.

Major Awards for a Pair of Black Scholars

James A. Anderson, chancellor of Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, will be honored by the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education and Tanure Ojaide, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, received the Nigerian National Order of Merit.

Three Scholars Honored for Their Kentucky African American Encyclopedia

There are more than 1,000 entries in the encyclopedia detailing African American history from frontier days to the present time. More than 150 scholars contributed to the entries in the volume.

Honors for Two African American Women Scholars

Goulda A. Downer, an assistant professor in the College of Medicine at Howard University in Washington, D.C., was honored by the Institute of Caribbean Studies and Alcorn State University has renamed its Fine Arts Building to honor long-time faculty member Joyce J. Bolden.

Wake Forest University Names a Campus Building to Honor Maya Angelou

Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, announced that its newest residence hall will be named to honor Maya Angelou, who served on the faculty at the university from 1982 until her death in 2014. The building will be the first on the Wake Forest campus to be named for an African American.

Three Black Scholars Honored With Prestigious Awards

The honorees are Gilda Barabino dean of the School of Engineering at City College of New York, Karla Smith Fuller of Guttman Community College in New York City, and Yacob Astatke of the School of Engineering at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

Rutgers University Scholar Wins Prestigious Literary Award

John Keene, associate professor of English and chair of the African and African American studies department at the Newark campus of Rutgers University in New Jersey, has been chosen as the recipient of the 2016 Lannan Literary Award for fiction.

University of Delaware Professor Honored by the Association of Black Women Historians

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, the Blue and Gold Professor of Black American Studies and History at the University of Delaware, is the winner of the Lorraine A. Williams Leadership Award from the Association of Black Women Historians.

Three Black Women Scholars Presented With Notable Awards

The honorees are Phyllis Sharps of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Vievee Francis of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Megan Covington of Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina.

Marilyn Nelson Wins the $25,000 Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature

Marilyn Nelson is a professor emerita at the University of Connecticut. Professor Nelson is a winner of the Pushcart Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Award three times. From 2001 to 2006, Dr. Nelson was the poet laureate of the state of Connecticut.

The University of Virginia Honors the Late Julian Bond With an Endowed Chair

Professor Bond, who was a civil rights pioneer and led the NAACP for 12 years, taught at the University of Virginia for 20 years. He was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and served in the Georgia State legislature for 20 years.

Kimberlé Crenshaw to Receive the Gittler Prize From Brandeis University

The Gittler Prize is presented annually to a person whose body of published work reflects scholarly excellence and makes a lasting contribution to racial, ethnic or religious relations. Professor Crenshaw, who is on the faculty at the law schools of Columbia University and UCLA, will receive the award and a $25,000 prize in October 2017.
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