Timothy Tyson: Historian floored he's won Grawemeyer Foundation award
For a book whose publisher worried it might be perceived as a religious work, "Blood Done Sign My Name" has done particularly well among church and Sunday school groups. Now it has won a prestigious religion award.
Author Timothy Tyson said he nearly fell over when he got a phone call earlier this week with the news that he had won the 2007 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, a $200,000 international cash prize. The award is given jointly by the University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
"I'm very proud and pleased, and a little baffled," Tyson said in a phone interview Thursday from his home in Chapel Hill. Tyson is a historian at both Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill.
The book, which tells the true story of the killing of a young black man in Granville County, is not explicitly about faith. It is about pervasive racism in the South during the 1970s, which led to the acquittal of the murder defendants and provoked riots and social upheaval.
But Susan Garrett, coordinator of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, said it speaks to a larger social issue. "Tyson is working with a systemic notion of sin," Garrett said. "Racism is a social sin. It reflects a brokenness. It's not the way God wants us to behave. The redemption is the remaking of the social system."
Named for industrialist and entrepreneur H. Charles Grawemeyer, the Grawemeyer Foundation at the University of Louisville annually awards $1 million in prizes -- $200,000 each for works in music composition, education, ideas improving world order, religion and psychology. Garrett said the religion award recognizes an idea, expressed in a book or documentary published or released within the past eight years. The winner last year was Marilynne Robinson for her novel "Gilead," about a third-generation Congregationalist minister in Gilead, Iowa, who writes a journal for his son....
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Author Timothy Tyson said he nearly fell over when he got a phone call earlier this week with the news that he had won the 2007 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, a $200,000 international cash prize. The award is given jointly by the University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
"I'm very proud and pleased, and a little baffled," Tyson said in a phone interview Thursday from his home in Chapel Hill. Tyson is a historian at both Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill.
The book, which tells the true story of the killing of a young black man in Granville County, is not explicitly about faith. It is about pervasive racism in the South during the 1970s, which led to the acquittal of the murder defendants and provoked riots and social upheaval.
But Susan Garrett, coordinator of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, said it speaks to a larger social issue. "Tyson is working with a systemic notion of sin," Garrett said. "Racism is a social sin. It reflects a brokenness. It's not the way God wants us to behave. The redemption is the remaking of the social system."
Named for industrialist and entrepreneur H. Charles Grawemeyer, the Grawemeyer Foundation at the University of Louisville annually awards $1 million in prizes -- $200,000 each for works in music composition, education, ideas improving world order, religion and psychology. Garrett said the religion award recognizes an idea, expressed in a book or documentary published or released within the past eight years. The winner last year was Marilynne Robinson for her novel "Gilead," about a third-generation Congregationalist minister in Gilead, Iowa, who writes a journal for his son....