Black Issues in Higher Education, January 4, 2001 White House Names Humanities Honorees National Endowment for the Humanities awards President Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton announced the 2000 National Humanities Medalists, an award administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities. An award ceremony was held last month in Washington and the winners were honored at a White House dinner... Princeton University English professor Toni Morrison is America's most renowned Black woman writer. Author of seven novels, a collection of essays and dozens of articles and reviews, she won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American woman to win the award since 1938 and the first African American ever. Her novel Song of Solomon won the 1977 National Book Critics Award, and Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. She was a senior editor at Random House for 20 years before being appointed Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton in 1989. In 1990 she delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Massey Lectures at Harvard. She also wrote the lyrics, with music by Andre Previn, for "Honey and Rue" and "Four Songs," which premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1992 and 1994 respectively. Her lyrics for "Sweet Talk," with music by Richard Danielpour, premiered in 1997. Morrison is a founding member of the Academic Universelle des Cultures and a trustee of the New York Public Library. She is also a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the International Parliament of Writers, the Author's Guild, and the Africa Watch and Helsinki Watch Committees on Human Rights. Some of her honors include the Rhegium Julii Prize for Literature (1994), the Condorcet Medal, Paris (1994), the Pearl Buck Award (1994), Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, Paris (1993), and the Modern Language Association's Commonwealth Award in Literature (1989)... |
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