The inaugural winner of the $50,000 Simpson Family Literary Prize — honoring “a writer who has earned a distinguished reputation and the approbation and gratitude of readers” — is T. Geronimo Johnson, “at the relatively middle stage of a burgeoning career.” Author most recently of The World to Come: Stories Jim Shepard won the 2016 Rea Award for the Short Story, cited for his “prodigious research” into history and science and “X-ray vision of the soul.” The National Book Foundation gave their Innovations In Reading prize to Barbershop Books, a community-based literacy program that creates child-friendly reading spaces in barbershops, founded in 2013 by Alvin […]
