Lifetime Achievement Award ~ May 22, 2009, 6:30PM

25th ANNUAL CELEBRATION OF BLACK WRITING FESTIVAL

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Lifetime Achievement Award ~ May 22, 2009, 6:30PM

LOCATION: Church of the Advocate, 18th & Diamond Streets, Phila., PA

For the first time in the history of the festival, Art Sanctuary will award four lifetime achievers: Dr. Houston A. Baker, Jr., distinguished scholar, cultural critic and poet, Terry McMillan, bestselling author, Walter Dean Myers, prolific young adult author, and Jerry Pinkney, multi-award winning children’s book illustrator and author.

SPECIAL AWARD:

Robert Bogle, President, The Philadelphia Tribune

Under the leadership of Bogle, The Philadelphia Tribune celebrates its 125th anniversary. The Celebration of Black Writing salutes this award-winning Black newspaper for its committed reporting and unparalleled community engagement.

Entertainment:

Special Memorial Tribute : Kristin Hunter Lattany

Poet, author and 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Sonia Sanchez will pay tribute to the late author and Professor Kristin Hunter Lattany.

Internationally acclaimed women’s acapella choral and percussion ensemble, Voices of Africa will perform.

Master of Ceremony: Rick Williams, News Anchor, 6ABC

Admission is $20.

Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients

Dr. Houston A. Baker Jr. is a native of Louisville, Kentucky. He received his BA (Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa) from Howard University. He received his MA and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA. He has taught at Yale, the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University. Currently, he is Distinguished University Professor and Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He has served as Editor of American Literature, the oldest and most prestigious journal in American Literary Studies. Professor Baker began his career as a scholar of British Victorian Literature, but made a career shift to the study of Afro-American Literature and Culture. He has published or edited more than twenty books. He is the author of more than eighty articles, essays, and reviews. His most recent books include Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism, Re-Reading Booker T and I Don’t Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South. His critique of black public intellectuals titled Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era is scheduled for release in 2008. Professor Baker is a published poet whose most recent volume is titled Passing Over. He has served in a number of administrative and institutional posts, including the 1992 Presidency of the Modern Language Association of America. His honors include Guggenheim, John Hay Whitney, and Rockefeller Fellowships, as well as a number of honorary degrees from American colleges and universities.

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Originally from Port Huron, Terry McMillan, with her phenomenal New York Times bestseller Waiting to Exhale, has become one of the most important American novelists writing today.

Terry McMillan received her B.A. in Journalism from the University of California at Berkeley, and attended the MFA Film Program at Columbia University. Macmillan's first novel, Mama, published in 1987, received a National Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation. She has been awarded a 1988 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in literature, a 1986 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the Doubleday/Columbia University Literary Fellowship. She was a three-time fellow at Yaddo Artist Colony and The MacDowell Colony. She has been a Visiting Professor of English at the University of Wyoming and Stanford University and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

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Walter Dean Myers has been writing since childhood and publishing since 1969 when he won the Council on Interracial Books for Children contest which resulted in the publication of his first book for children, Where Does the Day Go?, by Parent's Magazine Press. Since then he has published over seventy books for children and young adults. He has received many awards for his work in this field including the Coretta Scott King Award, five times. Two of his books were awarded Newbery Honors. He has been awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award and the Virginia Hamilton Award. For one of his books, Monster, he has received the first Michael Printz Award for Young Adult literature awarded by the American Library Association. Monster and Autobiography of My Dead Brother were selected as National Book Award Finalists.

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Jerry Pinkney's method of illustrating is unique. He says, "I don't see things until I draw them. When I put a line down, the only thing I know is how it should feel, and I know when it doesn't feel right. I work with a pencil in one hand and an eraser in the other, not knowing what I have until I put it down."

Pinkney worked hard to become an illustrator. He won a full scholarship to art school and later opened an art studio with a few other artists. Although he has done many kinds of illustrations, for everything from greeting cards to postage stamps, he thinks book illustration is the most exciting creative process of all. "Books give me a great feeling of personal and artistic satisfaction. When I'm working on a book, I wish the phone would never ring. I love doing it. My satisfaction comes from the actual marks on the paper… when it sings, it's magic."

Phone: 215.232.4485

Fax: 215.232.4088

info@artsanctuary.org