Frye Gaillard wins Alabama Governor’s Arts Award for Distinction in Literature

Frye Gaillard is no stranger to praise with his large body of over thirty published books on diverse aspects of Southern culture. Among many distinctions, he is the winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, the Eugene Current-Garcia Award for Distinction in Literary Scholarship, and the Clarence Cason Award. His recently published masterwork, A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, has received excellent national reviews and has had him touring from Boston to Berkeley; the work was also named to NPR’s Best Books of 2018 list. Earlier this summer, Gaillard was also a recipient of the Alabama Governor’s Arts Award, which recognizes his impressive body of work. The Alabama State Council of the Arts presented the award to Gaillard at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival on May 22 in a celebration of talent which included fellow winners Yvonne Wells for her folk quilting artistry and legendary singer Martha Reeves. The winning of the Alabama Governor’s Art Award for excellence in Southern letters is a high point of Gaillard’s career as a journalist and author, no doubt, but we expect there will be other such accolades for his forthcoming book, The Slave Who Went to Congress, an illustrated children’s book that tells the powerful true story of Benjamin Sterling Turner, the first African American from Alabama and only the second in our nation to enter Congress. Coauthored with Marti Rosner, the book is due out from NewSouth Books in January 2020.