As part of the Decatur Book Festival on
Sept. 6, the UGA Libraries and the Southern Regional Council presented the 2009 Lillian Smith Book Awards to authors Ariela Gross and John Robert Zellner.
Gross is a professor of the history of American law at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the law and race. The award is for her most recent book, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. She is currently working on a study of law and the memory of slavery in the U.S., U.K. and France, as well as a comparative project on law, race and slavery in the Americas with Cuban historian Alejandro de la Fuente.
A longtime civil rights activist, Zellner received an award for his 2008 memoir The Wrong Side of Murder Creek, A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement. From 1963-1965, Zellner studied race relations in the Graduate School of Sociology at Brandeis University. In the early 1990s while studying for a doctorate at Tulane University, Zellner wrote a dissertation on the southern civil rights movement. In 2005, he was a featured Civil Rights Luminary in the award-winning documentary Come Walk in My Shoes, airing periodically on PBS through 2010.
Internationally acclaimed as author of the controversial novel, Strange Fruit (1944), Smith is considered the most liberal and outspoken of white, mid-20th century Southern writers on issues of social and racial injustice. The Southern Regional Council established the Lillian Smith Award shortly after Smith’s death in 1966.
