A Legacy of Literary Excellence

In the wake of Ernest J. Gaines' recent passing, this year's Award of Literary Excellence winner Bryan Washington joins a lineage of impactful African American writers from the South.

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“It didn’t take long to see that there’s the world you live in, and then there are the constellations around it, and you’ll never know you’re missing them if you don’t even know to look up.” 

 So says the narrator of Bryan Washington’s “Lot,” the Houston native’s chronicle of the boys, brothers, and bayous in his debut short fiction collection of the same name, honored last month as the thirteenth winner of the prestigious Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Initiated by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation as one of the foremost prizes for up-and-coming African-American writers, the award bears a special significance this year in the wake of the passing of its legendary namesake, who died November 5 at his home on the old Louisiana plantation where he grew up. With an authorial voice cherished for its clearness and compassion in the midst of despair, Gaines built a reputation as much for his personal character as for the characters in his books, a writer remembered as one of Washington’s rare constellations unmissed, even outside the literary world. 

 Best-known for his 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, Gaines, in Washington’s words, “was very forthright in his themes, but also kind, and a champion of other artists’ work.” Having graduated from the University of New Orleans’s MFA program in Creative Writing, Washington knows the common thrill of someone paying close attention to his stories, but to be part of Gaines’s lineage and those of previous winners, he says, is a true gift, and very bittersweet.

 “These are stories set in a Latin and black community in Houston, narrated by a voice often marginalized by society,” says Anthony Grooms, a professor at Kennesaw State University and one of the judges who selected Lot as this year’s winner. “It can be rare to see these types of stories in the canon of Southern fiction, and Bryan’s style delivers an honest presentation of life without being cliché.”

 From a conveyer of human emotion to a preservationist of the South’s frayed history, Gaines shares with Washington the hard-earned success of writing about locality with a sense of the universal. Even so, with Gaines’s departure from the world we live in still so recent, the full extent of his legacy remains difficult to pin down. Perhaps, then, that nebula serves as a fitting atmosphere for a writer who, spying the lights of Lot’s hidden stars, improved life and literature by mastering the art of looking up.