Princeton University Press rocked the house at the 2011 PROSE Awards in Washington D.C., taking home a staggering 14 prizes!

“The PROSE Awards annually recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in over 40 categories. Judged by peer publishers, librarians, and medical professionals since 1976, the PROSE Awards are extraordinary for their breadth and depth.”

The press took home two Awards of Excellence, five Category Award Winners, and seven Honorable Mentions! Congratulations to our fantastic authors. A full list of who won what is available after the jump!

Congratulations to Lawrence P. Jackson, whose book The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 has won the 2012 BCALA Literary Award in the Nonfiction Category. This award recognizes excellence in adult fiction and nonfiction by African American authors published in 2011. According to the BCALA press release:

“The Indignant Generation is a fascinating exploration of the development of African American literature after the Harlem Renaissance to the modern day Civil Rights Movement. Lawrence P. Jackson offers readers rare insights into the lives of key players who contributed to the breadth of writing that flourished between 1934 and 1960. From Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes to James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, Jackson highlights the unique challenges faced by the writers during the time of the Great Depression, Jim Crow, World War II and the Cold War. Dozens of illustrations and photographs enhance this stunning work that celebrates African American artistic and intellectual achievement in writing. Professor Jackson teaches English and African American Studies at Emory University.”

Congratulations to Lawrence P. Jackson, whose book The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 is picking up accolades left and right. The book has won the 2011 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association, which recognizes “an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture.”

“In this magisterial narrative history of African American literature running from the end of the Harlem Renaissance to the beginning of the civil rights period, Lawrence P. Jackson expands the archive for assessing African American writing during a period that has often been reduced to protest writing. Jackson places writers into fresh contexts of cohorts (critics and editors included) and threads a clear narrative line through three heady decades jam-packed with African American authors publishing in a variety of genres and venues. Jackson is excellent on the important influence of the Communist Party, on mid-twentieth-century black literary culture, and on issues of publishing and reception. Beautifully written and rich in historical detail, The Indignant Generation should quickly become a standard work in twentieth-century African American studies and United States publishing history.”

Jackson’s work is also a finalist for the 2011 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction, from the Hurston/Wright Foundation.

“The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award™ is the first national award presented to published writers of African descent by the national community of Black writers. This award consists of prizes for the highest quality writing in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry.”

This photograph was taken at the mid-November launch for Lawrence P. Jackson’s new book, The Indignant Generation. Thank you to the New York Institute of Humanities for playing host and assembling a wonderful audience. We can’t imagine a better place or time to launch this new project. To view a video of Jackson describing the meticulous research he conducted while writing the book, please visit this web site.

Shown in the picture, left to right, are Mark Greif, Darryl Pinckney, Lawrence Jackson, and Rhoda Levine.

Last Friday, I posted a picture of two gentlemen and asked readers to identify the person holding a copy of The Indignant Generation. As promised, I am revealing the answer here: Lawrence P. Jackson is shown speaking to David Wilson who is the President of Morgan State University, a school both of Jackson’s parents attended in the 1950s.

Speaking before a luncheon crowd of 100 at Morgan State University’s Student Center, Baltimore native Jackson impressed the crowd with a history lesson, a Morgan State University history lesson. Jackson, Professor of English and African American Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, spoke for an hour about the impactful careers of Morgan English teachers Nick Aaron Ford and Waters Turpin. Jackson cataloged the travails and triumphs of each men’s careers during the era of segregation. The lecture began with a shocking account of the violence black professors faced during the 1940s. Ford and Turpin both resisted the oppressive system. Jackson claimed that Dr. Ford, who served Morgan from 1946 through the 1970s, possessed a “black critical independent spirit.” Novelist Waters Turpin grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and published important works in the second half of the 1930s. Jackson suggested that Turpin’s obscurity today was due to his artistic vision which was too elegant for the Marxists and too militant for the assimilationists.

The lecture was drawn from Jackson’s new book The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. The 600 page literary and cultural history is being published by Princeton University Press in mid-November. The audience included Morgan’s new president David Wilson, the school’s provost T. Joan Robinson, and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts Burnie Hollis Jr. Agnes Edwards, a Morgan graduate and former student of both Drs. Ford and Turpin, said, “I didn’t know any of that, but I am glad that I do now.” When asked which portions of the new research he would use, Dean Hollis, another former student and friend of both men, smiled broadly and said, “All of it!”

**This text taken from Emory University’s event press release.

The file name might give you a hint, but make your guess known below in the comments for this post. I’ll reveal the identity of this reader and the location and purpose of the event on Monday.

While researching his biography of Ralph Ellison, Lawrence P. Jackson found a huge gap in African American literature–a gap in how it is studied and taught. Students of American literature are taught about the Harlem Renaissance, but what existed between this period and the later writers of the Civil Rights Period? Who were the writers of the in between years? Why haven’t they been studied as a cohesive group? With The Indignant Generation, Jackson finally gives voice to this generation of writers and their staunch supporters.

Emory University has recorded two podcasts with Jackson — one in which he discusses his new book The Indignant Generation, and the other in which he reads from the book. Click over to give them a listen.

It’s not often that an author attempts to coin the name for an entire generation of writers, but that is exactly what Lawrence Jackson has done with The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. This group of writers exists somewhere between the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights period and until now has been, as a group, unnamed.

I asked Jackson how he came up with the title of the book and it turns out he had another title in mind when the book was first underway.

“When I arrived at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in the fall of 2004 I had a title all ready for my book project, an epic literary history designed to fill the gap between the more plentiful works on the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. The book title was A Song in the Front Yard, after a Gwendolyn Brooks poem,” says Jackson. “To Brooks the poem’s title was ironic, because the speaker in the poem hoped to claim not just the front yard but the back alley too. I loved the sound of it, and so did my fellow humanists in Tar Heel country. But no editors had any confidence in those words to lure an audience.”

Though poetic, A Song in the Front Yard soon gave away to Indignation, but Jackson had not quite arrived at title of the book as it stands now.

“Next try, and the handle for the subsequent four years, was A Renaissance of Indignation. Educated Americans knew about the American Renaissance of the 1840s and 50s and the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance, so that word seemed worth its weight in gold. But when the chapters sailed out for review the balking began in earnest,” explains Jackson. “I learned that my title was contradictory, fussy and fractious. And by using a semi colon to clarify the work–’A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960′—I was guilty of writing the equivalent of War and Peace: A Novel.”

Though ‘renaissance’ was lost in the shuffle, ‘indignation’ stuck. Jackson describes the word as being like “a talisman, a fetish, a raven, an albatross.”

He further explains, “Indignation became the lingua franca that united my writers as a group, distinguishing them from the folk artists of the 1920s and the revolutionaries of the 1960s. In a letter detailing the power of Native Son, Ralph Ellison had praised the ‘indignant consciousness’ of Bigger Thomas, a shift in attitude among the lumpenproletariat that Ellison wagered would play a crucial role in making representative democracy in the United States a possibility. This kind of unapologetic defiance seemed to characterize the bunch, and, piggybacking a bit off of Tom Brokaw’s book title, The Indignant Generation was born.”

The Indignant Generation will publish in December 2010, but you might enjoy watching this video of Jackson describing the project and the research involved.

The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 won’t be out for many months, but I thought you might like hearing more from the author about how he came to write the book and how he conducted his research. You can place pre-orders online or follow the book on Facebook.

We’re launching our Fall 2010 list this week with our sales conference. We invite you to be the first to checkout our new catalog online. http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/F10trade.html Also available in PDF format: http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/F10Seasonal.pdf