2025 Winner: Percival Everett
The livestream of the public program celebrating “James: A Novel” by Percival Everett at the Immanuel Congregational Church is available on our YouTube channel! This is a great opportunity to share the experience of the event for the first time, catch anything that was missed (the sound is directly from the microphones), or listen back to some of the best moments.
With great excitement, the Stowe Center announces Percival Everett as our 2025 Stowe Prize for Literary Activism winner, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book James: A Novel (Doubleday, 2024), which offers a more truthful representation of an enslaved person, one free of many of the stereotypes cast upon Black people throughout the American literary canon.
Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
The Stowe Prize for Literary Activism recognizes the author of a distinguished book of general adult fiction or nonfiction whose written work illuminates a critical social justice issue in the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The winning book applies informed inquiry, is accessible and engaging to a wide audience, and promotes empathy and understanding. In creating this award, the Stowe Center recognizes the power of literary activism.
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“A masterpiece that will help redefine one of the classics of American literature, while also being a major achievement on its own.”
