Both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Book Foundation recognized Harvard affiliates last week in announcements about their annual awards.
Among the 12 recipients of the National Humanities Medal were:
- Wynton Marsalis, D.Mus. ’09, “for celebrating the traditions of jazz music from New Orleans to Lincoln Center and beyond”—including at Harvard, in his lecture and performance series, “Hidden in Plain View: Meanings in American Music,” from 2011 to 2014.
- Bass professor of English Louis Menand, “for prose and essays that invite us to think in new ways about the forces shaping our society.” His article “The Ph.D. Problem,” excerpted from his book The Marketplace of Ideas, appeared in this magazine’s November-December 2009 issue.
- Elaine Pagels, Ph.D. ’70, LL.D. ’13, “for her exploration of faith and its traditions.” A member of Princeton’s faculty since 1982, the historian of religion is perhaps best known for her book The Gnostic Gospels.
The National Book Foundation also announced 10 nominees for each genre of the National Book Award over the course of several days.
The fiction nominees included What Belongs to You, the debut novel of Garth Greenwell, A.M. ’04. In his New Yorker review, James Wood, professor of the practice of literary criticism, offered these words of praise: “In an age of the sentence fetish, Greenwell thinks and writes, as Woolf or Sebald do, in larger units of comprehension...” Also on the list was The Underground Railroad, the sixth novel by Colson Whitehead ’91 (profiled in “The Literary Chameleon,” from the September-October 2016 issue).
In poetry, Kevin Young ’92 (a member of the Dark Room Collective) was honored for Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015. Also recognized: The Selected Poems of Donald Hall, which samples from a long career—some 25 volumes of poetry, as well as numerous children’s books and nonfiction works. Hall ’52, JF ’57, was this magazine’s former poetry editor and America’s former poet laureate.
Nonfiction nominees included Viet Thanh Nguyen, RI ’09, for Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (cited in President Drew Faust’s address at Morning Prayers this fall) and Cathy O’Neil, Ph.D. ’99, for Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, also made the list. Author Adam Cohen ’84, J.D. ’87, probed the University’s troubling connections to its subject in “Harvard’s Eugenics Era” (from the March-April 2016 issue).
The final volume in the graphic novel trilogy March, written by Congressman John R. Lewis, LL.D. ’12, and Andrew Aydin, and illustrated by Nate Powell, was recognized in the category of young people’s literature.
The nominees will be winnowed to a short-list of finalists, announced on October 13. Winners will be honored at a ceremony on November 16.
