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DePauw Prof. Gloria wins 2013 book award for poetry
Eugene Gloria, DePauw University associate professor of English, is the recipient of the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for poetry for "My Favorite Warlord."
Announced recently, the Anisfield-Wolf Awards "recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures."
Gloria and the other winners will be honored at a Sept. 12 ceremony at the Ohio Theatre in Cleveland. It will be emceed by Henry Louis Gates Jr., who chaired the jury for the awards program.
"The 2013 Anisfield-Wolf winners are exemplars who broaden our vision of race and diversity," said Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he directs the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research.
"This year," Gates said, "there is exceptional writing about the war in Iraq, slavery on a Kentucky pig farm, the Filipino experience in the U.S., and the complexity of families in which a child is radically different from parents."
"(Gloria's) collection, a meditation on his late father and a lyric memoir of 1967, when he was 10 years old and emigrated with his family from The Philippines to San Francisco, touches on issues of heritage, identity and memory," reports the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
The DePauw professor told the newspaper, "I'm incredibly honored. My wife and I were weeping when we finally accepted that this was a real thing."
Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf established the book prizes in 1935, in honor of her father, John Anisfield, and husband, Eugene Wolf, to reflect her family's passion for issues of social justice.