Book News: Frederick Douglass Prize

Thrilled (and floored) to announce that I am a co-winner of this year's Frederick Douglass Book Prize, along with Professor Simon Newman of the University of Glasgow. The list of past winners includes so many fantastic historians -- a number of whom you'll find in the footnotes of my own book -- so to have my book appear alongside theirs is an incredible honor.

R. Isabela Morales and Simon Newman

The Frederick Douglass Prize is awarded by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center and recognizes the best book written on slavery, resistance, or abolition in the last year. From the press release:

Gilder Lehrman Center director David W. Blight commended the two books for the “breadth and depth of their scholarship and sensitive treatment of human-centered struggles for emancipation.” Jury chair Kerry Ward added that, in combination, the “compelling writing” of the winning books helps readers understand “the diversity of the experiences of slavery in different times and places,” with people centered at the heart of these stories.

Simon Newman's book is Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London, and is available from the University of Chicago Press. Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South, by Dr. David Silkenat of the University of Edinburgh, was also shortlisted for this year's prize, and is available from Oxford University Press.