August 13, 2019
The Crook’s Corner Book Prize Foundation announces its annual Longlist for best debut novel set in the American South. Now in its seventh year, the $5,000 prize will be presented in January 2020. The Longlist includes:
The Gulf
by Belle Boggs
(Graywolf Press)
Hap and Hazard and the End of the World
by Diane DeSanders
(Bellevue Literary Press)
Confessions of an Innocent Man
by David R. Dow
(Dutton)
Treeborne
by Caleb Johnson
(Picador)
The Atlas of Reds and Blues
by Devi S. Laskar
(Counterpoint Press)
Where the Crawdads Sing
by Delia Owens
(Putnam)
We Cast a Shadow
by Maurice Ruffin
(One World)
Sugar Land
by Tammy Lynne Stoner
(Red Hen Press)
Lot
by Bryan Washington
(Riverhead Books)
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Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom, published by Counterpoint Press, is the winner of the sixth annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the American South. This year’s judge was award-winning author Tayari Jones, who described the book as “an eye-opener, page-turner, and heart-breaker.”
A Kind of Freedom follows the downward spiral of an African-American family in New Orleans, from the 1940s through Hurricane Katrina. The family, anchored by a respected physician and his Creole wife, had occupied the upper echelons of black society in the city. But as each generation journeys through the 1980s and finally to the post-Katrina world, family members – despite never-extinguished hope – succumb to drugs and seemingly implacable futility.
Sexton, whose African-American grandfather and six of his children graduated from college, wanted to know why the following generations struggled even as it became possible for a black man to become President. “I wondered what systems took the place of Jim Crow in my generation,” she says. “I wanted to demonstrate the extent to which the current laws surrounding housing, drugs, and sentencing were as powerful as laws enforcing racial segregation in the 1940s.”
The New York Times review of the book declared, “For a debut novelist to take up such charged material is daring; to succeed in lending free-standing life to her characters without yielding an inch to sentimentality . . . announces her as a writer of uncommon nerve and talent.”
The Talented Ribkins
A Kind of Freedom
How to Survive a Summer