This year’s Sarah Josepha Hale Award winner is author, literary scholar and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. He will accept the honor at a ceremony at the Newport Opera House on October 3 at 8 p.m. For over fifty years, the Sarah Josepha Hale Award, has been given by the trustees of the Richards Free Library, in recognition of a distinguished body of written work in the field of literature and letters.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. will receive Sarah Josepha Hale Award at the Newport Opera House on Oct. 3.
A graduate of Yale University and Cambridge University, Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He has received many awards including a MacArthur Grant, an American Book Award and was named to Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans” list in 1997.
In a long, distinguished career, he [Gates] has operated with vigor and eloquence in both the academic realm and the popular culture in his quest to enrich the American literary canon with African American voices and to bring these voices to the public. – Mike Pride, former editor of the Concord Monitor
The award honors Sarah Josepha Hale, author, poet, and essayist, who as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine shaped the opinion of nineteenth century American women.
The library has given the award annually since 1956. Recipients include Robert Frost (1956), Archibald MacLeish and Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1958), John Kenneth Galbraith (1967), Roger Tory Peterson (1977), Donald Hall (1983), Maxine Kumin (1992), Tomie dePaola (2007) and Ken Burns (2008).
For more information about the Hale award, visit the library website or contact Library Director Andrea Thorpe at 603-863-3430 or email: rfl@newport.lib.nh.us.
Filed under: Announcements, Learning, Libraries & Books | Tagged: Henry Louis Gates, Newport Opera House, Richards Free Library, Sarah Josepha Hale, W. E. B. Du Bois
