Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair and professor in the Department of English, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, was recently selected as the 2022 fiction winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her 2021 debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois.
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize is an international award created in 2006 that recognizes the power of literature in promoting peace through a better understanding of other cultures and peoples. Jeffers, already a renowned poet and critic, entered the world of prose fiction with her award-winning novel, which tells the epic story of an African American family entangled in the history of colonial settlement and racialized slavery in the southeastern U.S.
Prior to being selected for the Dayton, Love Songs was reviewed prominently in all major publications, designated one of the 10 best books of 2021 by The New York Times, was the
winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, ranked finalist for a litany of other awards, and was an Oprah Book Club selection. The Literary Peace Prize represents a recognition of Jeffers’ gift for revealing and healing the traumas of history.
