Announcing the 2020-2021 Anisfield-Wolf Reflection Exhibition

The Cleveland Humanities Collaborative (CHC) invites faculty, staff, and students to participate in our second annual Anisfield-Wolf Reflection Exhibition. This initiative follows three CHC-sponsored summer seminars in which higher education community members across northeastern Ohio gathered to discuss each year’s award winners. The CHC is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is grateful to the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, Cuyahoga Community College, LAND Studio and the INTER|URBAN, and Case Western Reserve University for their support of this year’s exhibition.

The 2021 Exhibition will again be virtual; to see last year’s submissions, please visit our 2019-2020 Anisfield-Wolf Reflection Exhibition.

In 1935, Cleveland philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf founded The John Anisfield Prize to honor her father’s legacy of promoting social justice. When her husband Eugene Wolf died in 1944, Edith added his name, changing the prize to the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. The original intent of the award was to recognize fiction and non-fiction books focused on what was then called “race relations,” however, since inception, the award-winning books also embraced Black and African-American literature, Jewish history and literature, and sociological inquiry into systems of oppression. For 84 years, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have honored the best fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that explore human and cultural differences.

Winners have included Nobel Laureates Ralph Bunche, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, Nadine Gordimer, Gunnar Myrdal, and Wole Soyinka, along with other major literary figures such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was recognized in 1959 for his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, well before he became a national figure. Recent honorees include Marlon James, Margot Lee Shetterly, US poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, and Lifetime Achievement winners Orlando Patterson, Isabel Allende, and N. Scott Momaday. Now in its 84^th year, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards have a distinguished history of honoring writers who expanded our understanding of the complex histories and intersections of immigration, colonialism, disability, religion, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality.

The Anisfield-Wolf Reflection Exhibition draws on the mission, history, and authors of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards to inspire creative dialogue on our history and complex social issues. Participants are invited to submit their reflections, consisting of either written or non-written work, for consideration to be included in our Exhibition to be held in early April 2021. Everyone who submits work will receive a certificate of participation.

See the guidelines and instructions for reflection submissions here.

Please send submissions to Allison Morgan, CHC Program Manager (amm203@case.edu), by 11:59pm on Sunday, February 28, 2021. The submissions selected for virtual exhibition will be decided by Wednesday, March 17, 2021, and participants will be notified via email.