Five new members, including the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, have been elected to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame at UGA Libraries.
For the second year, the UGA Libraries are encouraging Georgians to read at least one book by each inductee before the Nov. 7 ceremony.
“Book clubs and individuals responded so favorably to last year’s suggested reading initiative that we are again making recommendations to introduce this year’s inductees to a wider audience,” said P. Toby Graham, university librarian and associate provost.
The Class of 2016 and their book selections are Bill Shipp, Murder at Broad River Bridge; James Alan McPherson, Elbow Room; Roy Blount Jr., Now, Where Were We?; Brainard Cheney, Lightwood; and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner.
In his 50-plus years in journalism, Shipp has become one of the country’s premier political commentators, whose pronouncements and predictions are heeded by policymakers and activists at all levels of government.
Published in 1981, Murder at Broad River Bridge is a nonfiction account of the 1964 murder of Lemuel Penn, a black lieutenant colonel in the army reserves who, on his way home to Washington, D.C., was shot to death near the Oglethorpe-Madison county line by Athens members of the Ku Klux Klan.
McPherson, a short-story writer and critic, won the 1965 Atlantic Monthly Firsts award for his early short story Gold Coast. In 1978, he was the first African-American recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his story collection Elbow Room.
Blount is a writer, humorist and journalist. In his second book, Crackers, published by the UGA Press, Blount delved into the presidency of fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter and offers political commentary.
Cheney was a 20th-century novelist, political speechwriter and essayist from the wiregrass region of South Georgia. During a writing career that spanned four decades (1939-69), Cheney published four novels that depicted the social transformation of South Georgia between 1870 and 1960.
Lumpkin was a sociologist, activist, teacher and writer who spent a lifetime studying and combating economic and racial oppression. As a member of a prominent Georgia family and the daughter of a veteran, the Macon native was inculcated in the cultural mythologies of the Lost Cause and white supremacy.
