Amaud Jamaul Johnson, winner of Council for Wisconsin Writers’ 2013 Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award can add another recognition to his list awards. The Tupelo Press has announced that Johnson is the recipient of its prestigious 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for poetry for his collection Darktown Follies. Here’s the Tupelo Press news release.
Our warmest congratulations to Amaud Jamaul Johnson, whose new collection Darktown Follies received the 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for poetry on Friday at the Carnegie Library in Northwest Washington.The judges found that the poems in “Darktown Follies” laid bare “the difficult terrain of the false images” created “by black face in Vaudeville.” Johnson’s collection, “crafts a manuscript which balances the false and ugly with the beauty and truths of the black lies that exist beneath the gaze.”The Zora Neale Hurston/ Richard Wright Foundation, which is based in Washington, was founded in 1990 with a mission to ensure the survival of black writers and literature by black writers.Here at Tupelo Press, we couldn’t be more pleased or thankful to see Amaud’s dazzling work receive this important and enduring distinction. It’s a brave and brilliant book, and we feel honored to have had the gift of publishing it.
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